CHANGES IN TOURIST ARRIVALS IN TUSCAN DESTINATIONS BETWEEN 2000 AND 2013: A GROUP BASED TRAJECTORY APPROACH

The aim of this paper is to examine the development of tourism in Tuscany’s municipalities, using a methodology to detect common growth curves from yearly time series (2000-2013) of the number of arrivals. The analysis is based on a partition of Tuscany into 262 areas derived from a partial aggregation of the original 287 municipalities. The work is carried out by finding a criterion to detect common time patterns of arrivals across territories, classifying territories according to such similarities in patterns, and verifying whether areas in the same group are also spatially contiguous. The study confirms the presence of heterogeneity in the growth patterns of different areal units. There is a general stability of the classical tourism destinations which are renowned worldwide. Other destinations have been developing due to exploiting the demand for rural tourism, interest in nature, environment and landscape, and so on. The growth patterns are derived by means of a special approach of finite mixture modelling: the group based trajectory model, a semiparametric method that aims to detect common patterns in longitudinal data.