Reimagining seasonality through environmental factors: insights from Uzbekistan’s tourism sector

This paper examines the environmental side of tourism seasonality in Uzbekistan, a fast-growing Silk Road destination with a sharply continental climate. Drawing on the tourism-climate literature on comfort optima and differences between origin markets, we test whether the temperature-arrivals relationship is non-linear and whether climate sensitivity differs by source market. Official monthly arrivals for 2018–2025 are combined with reanalysis temperatures and analysed with seasonality indices, Gini decomposition and quadratic regressions. Flows from neighbouring countries, over four-fifths of arrivals, respond weakly to temperature. Long-haul flows follow an inverted-U response with a comfort optimum near 20°C, producing spring and autumn peaks and a deep winter trough. Theoretically, the results suggest that climate elasticity is a property of the market-destination pair and natural and institutional causes of seasonality coexist within a single market. We therefore propose a differentiated strategy in which the autumn peak is managed, the shoulder seasons are deepened, winter promotion is aimed at regional markets, and the off-season is protected as a recovery period.