Beach tourist comfort in a warming climate: Assessing the reliability of climate indices

Climate change is expected to reduce tourism demand at popular beach destinations due to rising temperatures. Recent research has employed climatic indices to overcome the limitations of relying on temperature exclusively. However, the performance of traditional tourism climate indices may be inaccurate for certain key market segments, especially under higher temperatures, potentially biasing future projections. Surprisingly, no research has yet compared objective climate indicators with tourists' actual perceptions and experiences of the weather. This study aims to validate the performance of climate indices by comparing them with the reported weather perceptions of 10,000 tourists who visited Mallorca (Spain), one of Europe's leading coastal destinations. Results revealed a significant mismatch between index values derived from traditional methodologies and the climate perceptions reported by tourists, highlighting the need to refine the methodology of tourism climate indices to more accurately reflect tourists' experiences of weather and climate conditions.