Comparison of Holiday Climate Index (HCI) and Tourism Climate Index (TCI) in Urmia

Introduction; Tourism has become one of the largest global economic sectors in the world and contributes significantly to national and local economies. Climate has a significant influence for tourists’ decision-making process, and it is a key factor considered by the tourists either explicitly for the purpose of travel planning or as a primary motivator. The first attempt to develop a numerical index for evaluating climate for tourism purposes was by Mieczkowski (1985) who designed the ‘Tourism Climate Index’ (TCI). The purpose of the TCI was to present a quantitative composite measure to evaluate the world’s climate for general tourism activities by integrating all climatic variables relevant to tourism into a single index.
The TCI has been widely applied to assess the future climate suitability of destinations. Despite the TCI’s wide application, it has been subject to substantial critiques. The four key deficiencies of the TCI include: (1) the subjective rating and weighting system of climatic variables; (2) it neglects the possibility of an overriding influence of physical climatic parameters; (3) the low temporal resolution of climate data (i.e., monthly data) has limited relevance for tourist decision-making; and (4) it neglects the varying climatic requirements of major tourism segments and destination types. To overcome the above noted limitations of the TCI, a Holiday Climate Index (HCI) was developed to more accurately assess the climatic suitability of destinations for tourism. The main purpose of this study is to evaluated and compared tourism climatic condition in Urmia by using holiday Climate Index (HCI) tourism climate index (TCI).
In this study, two tourism climate indices, the Tourism Climate Index (1985) and newly designed Holiday Climate Index have been applied. Daily data of air temperature, relative humidity, precipitation, cloud cover, sunshine and wind speed were obtained to calculate both indices. The TCI was designed by Mieczkowski (1985) as a method to evaluate climate suitability for general tourism activities. The TCI assesses a location’s climate suitability for tourism by grouping seven climatic variables into five sub-indices. In this study, daily climatic data was used as the TCI’s input for the purpose of comparing the rating differences between the two tourism climate indices. The index score calculated according to the TCI formula was then adapted to the classification scheme designed by Mieczkowski (1985) to describe a location’s climate suitability for tourism. A new tourism climate index, the Holiday Climate Index (HCI) was designed with the purpose of overcoming all identified deficiencies and limitations of the TCI. The HCI uses five climatic variables related to the three facets essential to tourism: thermal comfort (TC), aesthetic (A), and physical (P) facet. A major advancement of the HCI is that its variable rating scales and the weighting component system were designed based on the available literature on tourists’ climatic preferences that have been obtained from a range of surveys from the last 10 years.
Current climatic conditions (1981-2010) of Urmia were rated using both TCI and HCI. This station has a summer peak climate distribution when rated by the TCI. This means that summer months have the most suitable climate for urban tourism. Similar to the TCI ratings, Urmia has a summer peak climate distribution when rated by the HCI. By comparing the HCI and TCI monthly, it can be seen from that rating differences between the two indices are more prominent in winter months, and that the HCI rates the climate for tourism higher. then rating differences between the two indices in thermal, aesthetic and physical facet compared. When the HCI was compared with the TCI in assessing climatic conditions of Urmia, rating differences were observed from temporal aspects. The HCI ratings are generally higher than the TCI ratings in most months of the year. Seasonally, a major disagreement between the two indices exists in the rating of winter climate conditions, as winter has the widest gap in ratings between the TCI and HCI. When temperatures become warmer, the gap between the two indices becomes narrower.
In assessing a destination’s climatic suitability for tourism, the Tourism Climate Index (TCI) has a dominant place literature. An ideal tourism climate index would integrate the effects of all facets of climate, simple to calculate, easy to use and understand, recognize overriding effect of certain weather conditions and most importantly, based on actual tourist preferences. This paper intended to fill this gap by introducing a new tourism climate index, the Holiday Climate Index (HCI). By comparing the rating differences between the two indices under specified weather conditions and comparing the ratings against visitation data, a reasonable conclusion could be drawn regarding to whether the HCI is a better index than the TCI in rating the climate suitability for tourism and whether existing studies using the TCI to assess tourism climate resources should be reassessed.