The impact of terrorism on the portuguese tourism demand

Abstract

This study focuses on the impacts of terrorist activity on the tourism industry of a significantly safer competing destination. Specifically, it concentrates on the effect that terrorist attacks on Turkey and Egypt exerted on the Portuguese inbound tourism demand for the period of January 2004 to December of 2015. Besides looking at the aggregated tourism demand, individual demand from Germany, France, United Kingdom, and United Stated were also analyzed to see if the effects differed across these nationalities. The estimation results indicated that all four individual demands suffered positive effects with the occurrence of acts of terrorism of high intensity, suggesting that the Portuguese tourism industry might benefit from such unfortunate events in the Middle-East.