Modelling inter- and intra-regional tourism flows in Spain - a spatial econometric approach

Domestic tourism is one of the most im-portant types of tourism in Spain, but also one of the most neglected and under-researched. The objective of this study is to 1. describe the domestic tourist flows in Spain for the year 2016 and 2. shed some light on the factors that drive this form of tourism. To describe domestic tourism, a destination-origin matrix is constructed, and the coefficients of tourist attraction for each region are calculated. The analysis of the driving factors is based on the estimation of a gravity model and a spatial autoregressive (SAR) model. The SAR model has the ad-vantage of accounting for spatial interac-tions' effects among regions. The authors' empirical findings reveal that spatial region-al dependence matters when modelling do-mestic tourist flows. Moreover, the level of income at both the origin and destination regions, and the characteristics of the region of destination, such as the quality of beach-es, level of accessibility, and the number of museums, theme parks and natural parks are also positively associated with domestic tourism. On the contrary, distance and rela-tive prices between the regions of origin and destination exert a negative effect. The estimates of the SAR model allow the quantification of the total, direct and spillo-ver effects of these factors. According to this quantification, it is found that the de-mand for inter-regional domestic tourism is unitary income elastic and highly price elas-tic.