Estimating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on international hotel guests in Spain

COVID-19 has impacted global tourism, with international arrivals dropping from nearly 1.5 billion in 2019 to only 381 million in 2020 (UNWTO, 2021). Destinations more reliant on international tourism have been the most affected, and the Spanish tourism industry is among the hardest hit by the pandemic (Duro et al., 2021). According to the Spanish Statistical Office (INE, n.d.), Spain had 55.98 million international hotel guests in 2019. This figure represented a historical record, and the culmination of a decade characterized by a sustained growth trend since the financial crisis of 2009. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic broke this growing trend, and the number of international guests dropped drastically to only 10.8 million in 2020 (INE, n.d.). Decision-makers are aware of the devastating effects of the pandemic and anxious to design policies and business strategies that mitigate them. However, planning and implementing effective measures require precise information about the pandemic’s economic impact on tourism. A better understanding of the pandemic’s economic consequences will allow decision-makers to determine an optimal framework for action. In response to this informational requirement, numerous descriptive studies aimed at explaining the immediate general consequences of the pandemic are ongoing. However, these studies are of limited use because they only corroborate what is evident: The pandemic is ruining the tourism industry worldwide (Kock et al., 2020). In general, there is a lack of empirical studies that analyse the magnitude of the pandemic’s negative consequences on tourism that can guide decision-making (Wickramasinghe & Ratnasiri, 2021). The main goal of the present research is to fulfil decision-makers’ informational requirement. Specifically, the aim is to assess the impact of COVID-19 on international tourism in Spain in 2020. In particular, the most recent official data available from the INE is used to perform a counterfactual analysis based on the predictions of an optimal seasonal autoregressive moving average (SARIMA) model. These forecasts allow simulating a hypothetical scenario of international tourism to Spain in 2020 had the pandemic never occurred.