Industrial legacy and hotel pricing: An application of spatial hedonic pricing analysis in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France

An old industrial region's legacy can be a serious impediment to the development of tourism and other activities by generating negative externalities and disamenities. The aim of this article is to examine whether the cost of this industrial past as valued by tourists is reflected in hotel rates of the Nord-Pas de Calais region, a forerunner of the Industrial Revolution in France. An analysis based on the hedonic price method is undertaken using geolocalized data, to decompose hotel prices into the implicit prices of a set of attributes, both private and public, including the adverse public attributes inherited from the industrial past (brownfield sites, slag heaps, industrial seaports). By comparing the importance of each factor, our analysis provides useful information for public policy and hotel management strategies. In particular, our estimations reveal a significant negative effect of these adverse inherited public attributes on hotel rates for the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, but in the same order of magnitude as the effect of a tourist attraction, suggesting the potential power of public policy and local regeneration initiatives. Furthermore, our results show that hotel managers can obtain valuable information relative to the choice of a location for initial development, their investment strategy, and their communication strategy.