Economic and financial risk factors in the tourism sector

With this work we want to deal with the problem of quantifying one or more risk factors, which are necessary to the determination and evaluation of indices that allow us to obtain elements of profitability, productivity, performance and can therefore contribute to management’s strategic choices and, in this way, be indispensable for sector development. It begins with tackling one of the quite thorny problems such as that of assessing the risk that a person incurs by investing part of his capital in a medium-small company, operating precisely in the tourism sector. A model that allows reaching the expected return of the risk capital is provided by the equation of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), but in its application the main obstacle is the determination of the Beta, representative of the systematic risk of these companies, since there is no historical record of returns, it becomes difficult to make some assessments. It was therefore decided to build a sample of companies of the sector, for which it has been evaluated the trend of the return of the risk capital over a time interval and by using the Regression Beta method, applied to individual returns of each company compared to the average returns provided by the market, consisting of the average of the entire portfolio observed, a first assessment of the systematic risk was reached. In a second step, it was decided to use a Business Risk Index (BRI), in which the weight of the financial structure of the individual production units examined was appropriately considered. Finally, a further comparison is done in relation to a heterogeneous market made up of companies representing different economic sectors and operating in the same territorial area. Interesting observations are deduced from the comparison of the results obtained with consequent reflections and suggestions on the evaluation and quantification of this risk factor.