Studying complex tourism systems: a novel approach based on networks derived from a time series

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method using visibility graphs to analyze tourism destinations as complex dynamic systems, transforming time series data into networks to uncover structural and dynamic features for better policy guidance.

Contribution

It applies the visibility graph algorithm to tourism data, providing a new network-based approach to understand complex tourism systems.

Findings

Revealed structural features of tourism destinations through network analysis

Demonstrated the method on Italian national and regional tourism data

Provided insights into the dynamic behavior of tourism systems

Abstract

A tourism destination is a complex dynamic system. As such it requires specific methods and tools to be analyzed and understood in order to better tailor governance and policy measures for steering the destination along an evolutionary growth path. Many proposals have been put forward for the investigation of complex systems and some have been successfully applied to tourism destinations. This paper uses a recent suggestion, that of transforming a time series into a network and analyzes it with the objective of uncovering the structural and dynamic features of a tourism destination. The algorithm, called visibility graph, is simple and its implementation straightforward, yet it is able to provide a number of interesting insights. An example is worked out using data from two destinations: Italy as a country and the island of Elba, one of its most known areas.