The Impact of Air Quality on Inbound Tourist Arrivals over China Based on Grey Relational Analysis

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1. Kindly check the English language grammar and typographical errors once before submitting the revised version.
2. Please give references for regulations for improving air quality, Line 35-37, Introduction.
3. Please mention in the manuscript, what was the reason for choosing different length of data periods for different parameters?
4. The AQI formulation/categories and the reference should be specifying in the manuscript.
5. In section 2.2.2, Grey Relation Coefficient calculation, please mention the source of these equations.
6. In Figure 1, was it necessary to keep the ordinate from 0 to 15000? I believe keeping the scale from 4500 to 15000 will be able to show the variations in a better way. Please modify the scale. Also, it will be better to keep Chinese Compatriots and Foreign nationals as subplots in the figure. It is hard to see the variation clearly in one plot only.
7. The grey relation analysis should be explained in a simpler way in the results section. For mathematical researchers, the interpretation may be fine, however for non-mathematical background researchers, nothing is clear. It only shows that there are some bad air quality days which are higher in number. But that is not what authors want to prove.
8. Kindly keep points in your conclusion section and shorten the section.

Author Response

Revised accordingly.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Reviewer comment for sustainability-1347131: “The Impact of Air Quality on Inbound Tourist Arrivals over China Based on Grey Relational Analysis” by Zhang et al.

The manuscript investigates the impacts of air pollution on inbound tourist arrivals over China using the 9 years data from 2009-2012 and 2013-2019. The authors adopt the grey relational analysis and find that space heterogeneity exists for the air quality changes impacts on inbound tourists. The air quality evaluation standards also impact the specific relation between air quality and tourism. The paper is well structured. The social science topic of investigating the air pollution impacts is of interest to the broad community. However, there are several places that need more clarification. For example, the authors admit that there are other factors that affect in-bound tourism but didn’t give any discussion regarding these factors, such as the world economy. In the methods and results section, the data description and results of PM and gaseous pollutant concentration are missing. More comments are below:

 

Major Comments:

• Other factors that impact inbound tourism: Will the world economy impact the inbound tourist? Is there a way to potentially discrete impacts of air pollution and the work economy? I understand it may not easy but adding some discussion would be beneficial.
• Air pollutant data: Please add the description of the sources (environmental agency?), time resolution (hourly, daily, monthly?), spatial resolution (each city or each province?), number of data points for PM, and gaseous pollution data. A spatial map would also help. Do they also come from China Statistical Yearbook? A spatial map of the observational network would also help.
• How AQI and API are calculated? Considering the importance of air quality evaluation methods on quantifying the air quality change impacts on tourism, please add corresponding information regarding how the two indexes (AQI and API) are calculated.

 

Minor Comments:

• Ln 7: ‘The status of air pollution has…’----Air pollution has significant impacts on …
• Ln 18-19:’ under different air quality evaluation standards due to the 18 estimated difference of air quality indicators.’ ----Please rewrite the sentence.
• Ln 33: ‘in 2012[2]’----in 2012 [2]
• Ln 49: Please write out PM₅ or add a short description of this term.
• Ln 89: What does UN in UNWTO stand for?
• Ln 90-91: ‘Actually, the latter… Therefore,…--- Can you rewrite this sentence? The logic seems confusing. Does UNWTO have the number of inbound one-day tourists’ data?’
• Ln 127-128: I think it is worth mentioning that the classification of grads differs from the international standard.
• Ln 149, 155: Maybe try another subsection number format: 1) or a)
• Ln 192-193: This paragraph is too short.
• Ln 305-306: ‘Only the annual average concentration of PM10….’---This is an incorrect sentence. The average concentration of PM10 cannot be 0.5
• Figure 8: Please add information of the subplots (a)-(d)

Author Response

Revised accordingly.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

My comments were addressed satisfactorily.