Tourism Seasonality and its Potential Impacts

Many tourist destinations with a supply climate dependent suffer from a serious problem of seasonality. In other cases, the rules and social practices (holiday periods, pilgrimages, fairs or congresses, etc.) can generate seasonality. In the literature, the authors talk about economic causes, Push (climate, etc.) and Pull (calendar, fashions, etc.) factors, causes on origin and destination, available workforce and alternative uses of resources. All destinations have some type of seasonality, in some cases is extreme as the coast or winter sports destinations and other minimum as urban destinations. The objective of this paper is to describe a theoretical example which compares two regions, one with great seasonality and another with seasonality almost zero, and describe the differences in terms of impact on the destination (profitability, labor contracting, use of facilities, collapse of public services, damage to natural resources, etc.). Intends with the reby to emphasize that problems are attributable to this fact and how to reduce seasonality. Although the example is theoretical, many destinations fit quite accurately in this model.