Nicolás Garrido

Cruise passengers' expenditure in the Caribbean port of call of Cartagena de Indias: a cross-section data analysis

The cruise industry has become a significant component of the Colombian tourism economy and Cartagena de Indias has become the largest cruise port in the country. This paper provides a better understanding of the cruise industry by considering the expenditures of cruise ship passengers disembarking in Cartagena de Indias as a key variable in the economic analysis of the costs and benefits. The authors estimate two cross-sectional regression models for the cruising expenditure, showing the existence of different tourist profiles related to different expenditure levels. In particular, heavy spenders are distinguishable from the other segments in terms of age, hours spent off the ship, nationality, income levels and spending patterns.

Cruise passengers' satisfaction: Cartagena de Indias

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explain the onshore satisfaction of cruise passengers, in the port of call of Cartagena de Indias.Design/methodology/approach – A questionnaire was given to 1,361 passengers of 28 cruise ships during October and November of 2009, then factor analysis and cluster analysis were employed.Findings – The results suggest that although visitors held a high overall satisfaction of the onshore experience, there are two dimensions that require the attention of tourist policy makers: the city infrastructure (traffic, noise, cleanliness and infrastructure) and the general shopping experience. In particular, the worst experience seems to be related to street vendors. Moreover, there is evidence that tourists from the USA are more exigent of being fully satisfied.Research limitations/implications – The survey was only conducted in the months of October and November. Future research can also include the repetition of the study in different seasons to compare results. The study s...

Exploring Two Inflationary Regimes in Latin-American Economies: A Binary Time Series Analysis

The aim of this paper is to apply the methods of Symbolic Time Series Analysis (STSA) to a series of inflation from a group of Latin-American economies. Starting with a partition of two inflation regimes, we use data symbolization for identifying temporal patterns. Afterwards the statistical information obtained from the patterns is used to estimate the parameters of a nonlinear model proposed by Brida (2000).1 We compare the performance of the model against a naive benchmark predictor to verify its power to anticipate the qualitative behavior of the inflation time series. When the use of STSA is made through pure optimization criteria, the performance of the model is poor. However, when the partition of the space of states is made according to economics intuition, the performance of the model increases considerably.

Exploring the dynamics of the efficiency in the Italian hospitality sector. A regional case study

Highlights? A dynamical tool to describe the performance of economic efficiency is introduced. ? Static DEA, clustering and metric distances are the ingredients of the methodology. ? Case study is used to demonstrate the validity of the methodology. ? Policy and management implications for the Italian hospitality sector are presented. This paper introduces a methodology to describe and compare the economic relative performance of the hospitality sector of the Italian regions during the period 2000-2004. Dynamics of the hospitality sector of each region is represented by the evolution of its economic efficiency. The investigation involves the following steps: a static Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to estimate the pure economic efficiency; two different notions of distances between time series and hierarchical clustering techniques are used to classify the economies in the sample. By using a correlation-based distance, three main clusters are detected, while two clusters are identified when the average distance is used. The trend patterns, identified by employing the correlation distance, can be interpreted in terms of exogenous factors that influence the economic efficiency of the group of regions, causing shocks picked up by the high volatility as well as structural breaks. By employing the average distance, one infers information on the cluster that have had similar efficiency values over the period under analysis. This efficiency can be also interpreted in terms of a particular type of hospitality management as well as the firm structure. Following the analysis, some policy and management implications are presented.

The impact of earthquakes on Chile's international tourism demand.

This paper investigates the impacts of three earthquakes on international tourist arrivals in Chile. The shocks under analysis occurred on 21 April 2007, 14 November 2007 and 27 February 2010, in the north, south and center of Chile, respectively. The impacts are measured as the difference between the predicted and the effectively observed volume of visitor arrivals after the quakes in each Region. The predictions are computed using Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average models on monthly visitor arrivals during the period January 2004 to June 2010. The results indicate that the impacts depend on the magnitude of the earthquake, the perception of safety generated by news coverage and the type of tourism characterizing the region where the earthquake has occured. In the case of the most recent earthquake of 27 February 2010, the recovering status of visitors arrivals is studied, showing that the inbound arrivals to some regions have fully recovered from the devastation after 4 months while other regions have not.

Tourism forecasting using SARIMA models in Chilean regions

In this paper we search for the best SARIMA specification for forecasting arrivals in thirteen regions of Chile. We use monthly time series of arrivals from January 2004 to March 2009. The forecasting performance is assessed using data for the period October 2008 to March 2009. We use three methods for the specification of the model; the Box-Jenkins method with Akaike criterium, the method of minimizing the forecast error and the regARIMA method of the X12-ARIMA package. We compare the performance of the three methods according to their forecast results. Regions have different SARIMA specifications, resembling the underlying differences in tourism infrastructure and capacities available within each Region.

Public holidays, tourism, and economic growth:

In this article, a mechanism supporting the existence of an inverted u-shaped relation between the number of public holidays and the growth of an economy is presented. The nonlinear relationship is originated by two forces within a Schumpeterian economy: On the one hand, as the number of public holidays grows, the total number of workers searching for innovation increases; on the other hand, as the number of days of recreation increases, the number of working days producing innovations decreases. The combination of these two forces generates the inverted u-shaped relationship. The hypothesized mechanism suggests the existence of an optimal number of public holidays for an economy.

Modelling Decentralized Interaction in a Monopolistic Competitive Market

This paper models the interaction of consumers’ and firms’ optimal choices with imperfect information in a monopolistic competitive market institution. The decisions of the agents are modeled with stochastic utility and profit functions. We show that using Markov mean field and an agent based model specification the agents stays most of the time within a subset of the space of states. We explore how our results depends on the exogenously established price rule and we make specific interpretation of the transition rate parameters in the context of the economic problem.

The Allocation Of Surplus By Markets: A Framework For Analysis

The aim of this paper is to present algorithmic specifications of institutions as an alternative to the pervasive gradient institutions used in mainstream economics. A framework to evaluate the performance of the institutions is proposed using instruments from landscape theory. The problem of how a simple market allocates surplus is studied as an example of application of the framework.