The relationship between online media, visits, and stock performance in the recreational tourism industry: A case study of vail resorts

Using a VAR model, we investigate interactions between stock prices, trading volumes, online media, and physical visits to sites owned by a winter recreation firm as a case study. Our approach integrates online media mentions and net sentiment, visitor foot traffic, and stock market performance while controlling for exogenous S&P 500 performance. We apply Granger causality tests and construct impulse response functions. The results of our case study show a recursive relationship between online media mentions and visits. Limited evidence suggests online mentions precede sentiment and trade volume. We are unable to establish Granger causality for stock prices. Evaluating different strategies for handling misaligned data, we find imputation methods to be inferior to approaches that use sequential change based on the previous day’s actual observations.