SPACE ANALYSIS OF DATA AND TOURISM: NEW TECHNIQUES FOR TOURISTIC ANALYSIS. AN APPLICATION TO THE EXTREMADURAN CASE

Tourism analysis has several unquestionable spatial implications. Almost every tourism variable is conditioned by their values in neighbour tourism destinations. This situation is connected with spatial autocorrelation concept. This statistical concept has not been taken into account in tourism analysis until now. The aim of this article is to overview some analytical tools to test the presence of spatial autocorrelation in tourism variables analysis and, if this is the case, to identify spatial clusters in both global and local approaches. Another objective is to show how cartographical representation of tourism data improve susbtantially the analysis, because allow the researcher to locate relationships among tourism destinations, which, if these tools are not used, should stay hidden. Finally, in order to show the empirical usefulness of the previously presented techniques, the second part of the article is devoted to the empirical application of these tools to some tourism variables from a spanish tourism destination: Extremadura.