Impact of unexpected events on inbound tourism demand modeling: evidence of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak in South Korea

This paper attempts to evaluate how South Korea’s inbound tourist arrivals from China have been affected by the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak. Using quarterly data, the autoregressive distributed lag model (ADLM) is performed to capture the influence of the MERS outbreak. Estimation results of the general ADLM reveal that the MERS outbreak has a significant adverse impact on the total inbound tourist arrivals from China, as well as on tour arrivals; however, for business, official, and other types of tourist arrivals, its influence is insignificant. Furthermore, the error correction model is estimated to demonstrate the long-run equilibrium and short-run dynamics among the underlying variables. Our analysis not only provides empirical evidence on evaluating the impact of the MERS outbreak on different types of tourism demand, but also identifies main determinants and suggests appropriate model specifications for each type of tourist arrivals.