REVENGE travel: fact or myth?

ABSTRACT

‘Revenge travel’ is a popular buzzword that the media uses to describe the boom in tourism following the COVID-19 pandemic. However, little empirical evidence has been presented to confirm the existence of revenge travel. In this study, we collected the monthly number of visitors to Hawaii from 49 states and Washington D.C. from January 1999 to August 2022 and compared the patterns of the data before and after the pandemic. Rigorous statistical models were implemented to prove that the phenomenon of ‘revenge travel’ was real. We also estimated when revenge travel started and ended.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• Hawaii
• intervention analysis
• revenge travel
• SARIMA models

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Data source: https://dbedt.hawaii.gov/visitor/