Measuring seasonality at the major spa towns of Hungary

Abstract

One of the leading tourism products of Hungary is health tourism, where the certain supply segments are influenced by seasonality in different scales. The primary aim of our paper is to survey the seasonality of the 9 spas with the greatest turnover in Hungary with the help of the Gini index. Our research intends to provide an actual picture about the exact measure of seasonality in the highlighted spas of Hungary, due to the overall actuality of the problem and also because no such relevant quantitative research has been dealing with this issue in Hungary yet. The objective reason why these spas were chosen and surveyed is because first of all they are mono profile health tourism centres, where tourists are visiting the settlement exclusively because of the spas, and on the other hand the visitor turnover of the mentioned settlements are significantly higher than the following Hungarian spa towns. We believe that the more we understand seasonality the more we can face with its challenges concerning tourism development. For our seasonality analysis we used the commercial accommodation statistics of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office and to estimate the Gini index we applied the monthly dataset of the guest nights.