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We all know that climate change is having a major impact on weather patterns around the globe. One industry that is particularly exposed to these changes is the ski industry. Though large mountain/high elevation ski resorts may remain insulated from the impacts of shorter ski seasons and more erratic weather, those ski resorts at low altitude are particularly vulnerable to a changing climate. As a mid-latitude, lower elevation (comparatively) ski region, the Pyrenees are one area where the impacts of a changing climate are pronounced.

The social economy has long been an interest of mine. As a former employee of Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC), one of Canada’s largest and most successful consumer cooperatives, I’ve experienced first-hand the advantages (and challenges) of the ‘third sector’ (not-for-profit, co-op, volunteer organizations, etc.).

The most popular post (by far) on this blog is one where I present a simple version of Butler’s Tourism Area Lifecycle (TALC), done up in Excel: A Simple Tourism Model with Excel

I’m sure that many tourism business owners have spent a lot of time investigating review sites like Trip Advisor and Yelp, reading up on what their customers are saying. This is good business practice and tourism operators should always have an open ear to any praise or critique.

New web-based technologies such as Google Maps (a.k.a. “Geoweb” applications) are changing the ways in which individuals communicate their concerns. This is particularly true in the case of spatial phenomenon, such as instances of environmental change.

I’m pleased to announce that a chapter describing the development of TourSim, including a scenario on shifting tourist port of entry and identification of adoption constraints, is in the final stages of preparation for publication. This chapter is part of a new book "Planning Support Systems Best Practice and New Methods" published by Springer and edited by Stan Geertman and John Stillwell.

Just a reminder that your opinion is a big part of my research. If you have used any of the versions of TourSim on this site, please take a moment to fill out a survey. The TourSim evaluation survey is a great place to start.

Thank you for your interest and help!

Peter

I’ve made some major alterations to TourSim, both in the data that it relies on, and the types of experimentation it supports. I’m thinking that this is going to make TourSim much more usable for tourism planning, and begins to incorporate many of the ideas of complexity science (such as adaptation) into TourSim.

While there is quite a bit of interest in several fields in agent-based models (ABMs) as an approach to studying issues such as resilience, and thresholds, their complexity and technical nature is a significant barrier to their use. I’ve had a number of discussions with McGill professor Dr. Garry Peterson about alternate modeling approaches. One technology that he uses in both classes and in his publications is a simple Excel spreadsheet.

I’ve been putting together some sample results using the Baddeck Hotel Development scenario. I ran the model with the default range of accommodations, and then re-ran it with the “Add Hotel at Baddeck” button selected. You can experiment with this same scenario under the Tourism Scenarios tab. Below I’ve added a chart that shows the percentage change in tourist visitation per day (blue bar) and percentage change in income per day (green bar) at select destinations. This shows the difference between the base scenario and the add hotel scenario.