Low-cost carriers and tourism in the Italian regions: a segmented regression model

The paper analyzes the effects of air transport deregulation on international tourism flows in the Italian regions. Due to several reasons, tourist flows rarely are equally distributed within a nation. We focus on the accessibility to a territory as one of those reasons. Easy and cheap access to a destination is the prerequisite for its tourism development; in this respect, the advent of low-cost carriers has increased accessibility to many tourist destinations. We propose a segmented regression analysis to study the evolution of the share of European tourist arrivals in each region on the total European tourists visiting Italy. Accordingly, we identify which regions have gotten a higher advantage in terms of tourism growth due to the air transport deregulation.