Compare methods

	Gravity Model of Tourist Flows	Tourism Demand Elasticity Modeling
Field	Tourism Hospitality	Tourism Hospitality
Family	Regression model	Regression model
Year of origin	2014	1994
Originator	Clive Morley; Jaume Rossello; Maria Santana-Gallego	Geoffrey I. Crouch
Type	Spatial-interaction / bilateral-flow regression model	Econometric demand-elasticity estimation
Seminal source	Morley, C., Rossello, J., & Santana-Gallego, M. (2014). Gravity models for tourism demand: theory and use. Annals of Tourism Research, 48, 1-10.	Crouch, G. I. (1994). The Study of International Tourism Demand: A Review of Findings. Journal of Travel Research, 33(1), 12-23.
Aliases	Tourism Gravity Equation, Bilateral Tourist Flow Model, Gravity Model of Tourism Demand, Spatial Interaction Model of Tourism	Tourism Income Elasticity, Tourism Price Elasticity, Elasticity of International Tourism Demand, Tourism Demand Sensitivity Analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	The gravity model of tourist flows explains travel between an origin and a destination by analogy to Newton's law of gravitation: bilateral flows increase with the economic 'mass' of both the origin and the destination and decrease with the distance and cost of travel between them. Borrowed from international trade, the model has become a standard tool for analyzing the structural determinants of international tourism, capturing how population, income, distance, common language, shared borders, and historical or cultural ties shape who travels where. Clive Morley, Jaume Rossello, and Maria Santana-Gallego's 2014 Annals of Tourism Research paper grounded the tourism gravity equation in individual utility theory, while the broader trade literature — notably Anderson and van Wincoop's 'multilateral resistance' insight — showed how to specify and estimate it without bias.	Tourism demand elasticity modeling estimates how responsive tourist demand is to changes in its key drivers, above all source-market income and the price of travel. The income elasticity measures the percentage change in demand for a one-percent change in income, and the price elasticity does the same for price; both are recovered as coefficients in econometric demand models, most simply a log-linear regression where the coefficients read directly as elasticities. Geoffrey Crouch's mid-1990s surveys of the international tourism demand literature consolidated decades of such estimates, showing that tourism is typically income-elastic — a luxury that grows faster than income — and price-sensitive, with values that vary systematically across markets and methods. Later meta-analyses, such as Peng, Song, Crouch, and Witt's, quantified that variation across hundreds of studies.