Tourism resilience from networks: diversity and hierarchy

Abstract

We propose an interpretable, network-based measure of tourism resilience that maps destinations on a two-dimensional plane combining pre-shock market diversity and shock-period hierarchisation. Using monthly inbound international arrivals of non-resident foreigners to Colombian cities, we compute (i) pre-shock Shannon entropy of origins (2018–2019) and (ii) the maximum absolute residual from a monthly log–log Katz–size scaling during the COVID-19 shock (2020–2021). Applied to Colombia, the resilience plane identifies a core-centric system: most international arrivals concentrate in a few diversi- fied gateways that nonetheless experienced large hierarchy spikes under stress. A smaller set of “resilient hubs” combine high diversity with low hierarchisation but account for a minor share of volume. Results are robust to thresholding with interquartile cutoffs and to an alternative city–city projection (cosine simi- larity). The findings suggest that, for major gateways, market diversification alone is insufficient if access remains structurally compressed into a small set of dominant channels; for more fragile destinations, pri- orities include broadening source portfolios and improving connectivity to regional hubs. The approach is replicable with open data and standard network tools, and is portable to other countries to benchmark destination systems on a common, interpretable resilience scale.