Tourism Seasonality Index

Tourism seasonality measurement summarizes how unevenly tourism demand is distributed across the year. Destinations rarely receive visitors at a constant rate; arrivals, overnight stays, and revenue cluster in peak months and thin out in the off-season, straining capacity at the top and leaving resources idle at the bottom. Seasonality indices turn a monthly demand series into a single, comparable number measuring this temporal concentration. Simple ratios compare the peak month to the average or to the trough, while the Gini coefficient — long established in the study of inequality and adapted by Svend Lundtorp and others to tourism — captures concentration across all months at once via a Lorenz curve. Adjusted versions, such as Tsitouras's 'months equivalent' degree of seasonality, make the index easier to interpret and compare.