GEOGRAPHICAL AND STRUCTURAL CHANGES IN THE GLOBAL TOURISM NETWORK DUE TO COVID-19
GEOGRAPHICAL AND STRUCTURAL CHANGES IN THE GLOBAL TOURISM NETWORK DUE TO COVID-19

Summary/Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected the tourism economy, causing a severe global shock and effects on tourism mobility unevenly geographically distributed across regions. This paper detects changes in the global tourism flows network (GTN) in the period 2018-2020 due to COVID-19 and explains the GTN dynamics from a network science perspective. The analysis reveals the effect of underlying economic geography, as the pandemic introduced a new social distancing friction that induced centrifugal forces to the tourism network. The network’s topological pattern was described by small-world network characteristics before the pandemic outbreak, while during the pandemic there was a statistically significant reshape into more lattice-like characteristics accompanied by peripheral markets expansion of local hierarchy. The findings also demonstrate a reduction in the number of tourism flows and spatial connectivity, a simplification of the macroeconomic travel behavior, and a resilient performance of the main tourism hubs shaping and a distinctive core-periphery network structure. Overall, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the response of tourism mobility to the pandemic.

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