ABSTRACT
Travel and mobility restrictions together with social distancing requirements, capacity constraints, temporary closings and specific operational adjustments in rides and attractions have fully disrupted the business model of tourism-oriented theme parks in 2020 due to COVID-19. This chapter discusses the extent of the impact of the pandemic on the theme park industry during 2020 using mostly documentary data and company reports, and it evaluates market changes and trends in the case of a particular tourism-oriented theme park, PortAventura, applying exploratory spatial data analysis to geolocated social media data from Twitter. The final goal is to explore to what extent the downsized mobility regime and the long- and medium-haul travel restrictions may have transformed tourism-oriented theme parks into everyday leisure facilities in 2020. Even though sources are scarce and data from social media have limitations, results suggest that domestic visitors have been using tourism-oriented theme parks as if they were “tourists in their own homes”.
