THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 CRISIS ON ITALIAN PROXIMITY TOURISM: AN ORIGIN-DESTINATION MATRIX APPROACH

Abstract

The importance of proximity tourism has increased in the recent years due to COVID-19 crisis. Due to restrictions imposed by Governments to contain contagions, people could not cross national borders. Considering the work carried out by Guardia and Muro (2009) first, Domínguez (2014), and Alvarez-Diaz et al. (2020) later, this work focuses on the assessment of proximity tourism in Italy in the 2019-2020-2021 period. This study is based on the analysis of microdata made available by ISTAT (Italian Institute of Statistics). The work proposes to shed more light on the concept of proximity tourism and, in so doing, authors used an origin-destination matrix approach by calculating the coefficient of tourist attractiveness. The results of the study suggest a significant increase in trips within the Italian territory. Furthermore, these findings are also important in the political and market-decision sphere to orient internal and local policies in terms of domestic tourism.