Covid-19 and tourism impact assessment: cluster analysis for Europe region

Abstract

For a long time, the tourism industry was considered one of the economy’s leading and most progressive sectors, characterized by an advanced scale of development. The situation was changed fundamentally by the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused significant losses at the global level, not only for tourism but also for all sectors of the economy and society. In this regard, the provision of this article identifies the nature of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism in a particular country in the European region using cluster analysis. In the first stage of this work, a detailed literature review on the existence of such a connection was carried out with the help of bibliometric analysis. The authors used the results published in Scopus and Web of Science databases for the keywords «tourism», and «Covid-19» and analyzed the growth dynamics in their number and citations, belonging to the research area and the spread of geography. Building a bibliometric map of keywords based on their joint placement in the VOSviewer software complex deepened findings. It made it possible to form 10 clusters, each of which covers scientific works on various forms of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism (for example, behavioral, marketing, economic, environmental, psychological aspects, etc.). In the second stage, an analytical review was conducted, which showed a significant drop in the absolute and apparent contribution of travel and tourism to GDP worldwide in 2020 and 2021 worsened with the pandemic level, and an increase in the dynamics of key indicators of the tourism industry in the world and across all UNWTO regions (especially Asia & Pacific). In the last step, a hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis (with Ward’s method) was carried out for the countries of the European region (45 countries) based on indicators of the number of COVID-19 cases in the country (cumulative and new), vaccination of the population, the presence of restrictions on tourism, international tourist arrivals, and receipts, collection of tourism in exports. All indicators for analyzing the collected state are provided as of July 30, 2022, using the Stata SE 12 software complex. The construction of a dendrogram and the use of Calinski-Harabasz and Duda-Hart stopping rules made it possible to decide on the presence of 3 clusters that meet the conditions of this study and are characterized by different levels of adaptability to post-pandemic functioning and recovery direction.