Abstract

International audience; HSR and tourism: what can we learn from the past 50 years?Important investements in High Speed Rail (HSR) lines have been carried out all over the world since the opening of the first line in 1964. The analysis of the wider effects brought by these systems has been the core of major publications in the literature with the objective of investigating the benefits of the investments themselves.One aspect, less treated but of great interest, is the impact of HSR systems on the tourism market. Indeed, for an optimal assessment of this impact, some variables should be taken into account: firstly, how many tourists would not have gone to a given destination had the HSR not existed? Secondly, what are the characteristics of the tourists choosing to visit a destination served by a HSR line and what is the duration of their journey? ? Thirdly, do visitors spending justify the returns on investment?Some studies confirm that there is an impact, for example during the period between 1999 and 2010, the emerging HSR services did have significant impacts on boosting tourism in China. Provinces with HSR services were likely to have approximate 20% additional numbers of foreign arrivals and 25% greater tourism revenues than provinces without such systems (Chen and Haynes, 2012). But other authors show that it is not always the case in all the served cities (Todorovitch et al., 2011) and sometimes, a decrease of the journey has also been observed (Delaplace et al., 2014).The objective of this contribution is to show, through a literature review of studies carried out ex-post, that the effects are not systematic, since they depend on the implementation of the HSR service and on the characteristics of the places served. Indeed, if the HSR allows, in some cases, the increase in the number of tourists, a decrease of the length stay might follow. Some of the main findings of the scientific literature over the past 40 years are that the changes of accessibility of a destination served by a new HSR link is not the only element playing a role in tourism dynamism. It is necessary to take also into account the way HSR systems improve the image of the destination itself and the way they contribute to the coordination of the local stakeholders.