Valuing tourism demand attributes to guide climate change adaptation measures efficiently: The case of the Spanish domestic travel market

• Southern Spanish coastal provinces will become less desirable in summer.
• Southern Spanish coastal provinces will experience market share losses in summer.
• Adaptation strategies aimed at changing destination-specific attributes are required.
• Knowing the economic value of destination assets is crucial for policy efficiency.

Climate change (CC) may have substantial impacts on the distribution of current tourist flows by changing patterns of seasonal volumes of tourist demand. Such impacts are of potential importance for the Spanish coastal tourism destinations. In a context where the implementation of adaptation measures becomes relevant to counteract the expected CC-induced travel market share losses, this paper examines the role of preference analysis in the design of CC adaptation policies. Using data from the 2005 Familitur Survey on summer domestic tourist flows, a destination choice model is implemented to: 1) highlight the role of temperature and its relationship with other destination-specific attributes, 2) estimate CC-induced changes in travel market shares, and 3) compute the economic value tourists assign to a set of destination assets as a way to better permit the recovery the expected market share losses by regional tourism authorities.