The short -and long-run hotel demand in Switzerland ::a weighted marcoeconomic approach

This study develops a vector error correction model of hotel demand to incorporate both the short-run demand fluctuations and the long-run tourism growth. We distinguish between endogenous and exogenous variables in model development to advance previous tourism demand modeling. In addition, we develop a weighting scheme to account for the importance of explanatory economic variables that are pertinent to a source market of a destination to increase model accuracy. With an analysis of the Swiss hotel data from the first quarter of 1975 to the fourth of 2016, we found no evidence for the long-run market equilibrium of the three endogenous variables, namely hotel nights, real GDP of Switzerland, and real exchange rate of the Swiss franc. However, the short-run tourism demand depends largely on behavior persistence of tourists, which may have obscured the relationship between tourism demand and other economic variables