What Drives Liquidity of Tourism Companies? Microeconomic Evidence from Bulgaria, Czech Republic and Poland

Abstract

Current paper focuses on business economics of tourism industry. Liquidity of a company has the key role within financial management among all industries, including the tourism as well. However, the question still remains: What drives the liquidity among hotels and travel agencies? The aim of the paper is to investigate whether or not is the liquidity among tourism companies in Bulgaria, Czech Republic and Poland affected by other selected microeconomic variables. It is obtained financial data from annual reports of 1,892 tourism companies collected within Amadeus, the international statistical database. Estimated period is from 2006 till 2015. In particular it has been explored three variables (i) return on assets, (ii) share of stockholders’ funds, and (iii) average length of loans from creditors. As the main estimation method is employed the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) with panel data. A comparison is made between both, large as well as medium sized hotels and travel agencies in selected countries. Except of a few, it was proven that reinvestments of the decreasing profit supported liquidity among tourism companies during a period affected by the global financial crisis.

Keywords

• hotels and travel agencies
• cash conversion cycle
• panel GMM model