A LOGISTIC TOURISM MODEL: Resort Cycles, Globalization, and Chaos

This paper explores suggestions in the literature that the tourism industry is “chaotic” by transforming a previously developed resort model into discrete logistic equation (DLE), a widely researched chaos model. Given parameters characteristic of the industry, the logistic tourism model (LTM) explains, for example, the hesitant take-off of tourism, the role of agglomeration during the rapid growth phase, and why even in maturity, with slower average growth, a resort maintains its high growth potential and propensity for chaos. These and other findings suggest that globalizing industries, such as tourism, may exhibit quite different dynamics from those captured by traditional growth models or localized supply-demand elasticity models.