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Tourism, as a leading source of income for many countries, is one of the world's fastest-growing industries. Tourism demand is strongly influenced by the economic situation of the consumer, as well as by the political, environmental, security and health conditions provided by the host country. As tourism is not one of the first steps in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it is not part of the mandatory spending group. Holiday plans are among the first to be altered or cancelled if there is a threat to the tourist's ‘biological and physiological needs’ or ‘security needs’. Thus, the tourism sector is highly susceptible to crises. Turkey tourism movement has faced several major national and global shocks of different origins recently. This study aims to examine the impact of crucial crises and of the current COVID-19 pandemic on the tourism industry in terms of their characteristics, social conflicts, political situation and responses. To achieve this objective, the development of the tourism sector in Turkey has been analyzed taking into account the conditions of the world economies. Comparisons were made between overall figures for incoming tourists, tourism revenues and hotel occupancy rates in Turkey for the time periods before, during and after these crises, considering certain other effects. The figures are related to significant incidents, economic, political, health, social or environmental crises that have occurred at the national or global level.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the relationship between emotion and European energy forward prices of oil, gas, coal and electricity during normal times and periods of extreme price movements.

Methodology/Approach – We use a biorhythm approach characterized by the seasonal affective disorder (SAD) variable to study the impact of emotion on energy markets. Normal times and periods of extreme price movements are approximated by OLS and quantile estimations, respectively.

Findings – We use European energy forward prices of oil, gas, coal, and electricity. European equity future index (Dow Jones Euro Stoxx 50) and euro/dollar US exchange rate are used as control variables for economic and financial environment. Estimating OLS and quantile regressions, we find that seasonal patterns have a significant impact during extreme volatility periods only. Further investigations reveal that the SAD effect is significant during periods of price decrease, but insignificant during price increase times. The out-of-sample predictive ability properties show that our “SAD model” outperforms significantly the pure “macroeconomic” one.

Originality/Value of chapter – This topic is novel in energy finance since I use psychological background theory to understand energy price dynamics. I illustrate the relevance of our approach by comparing the out-of-sample predictive ability of our model against macroeconomic one. My results could be considered to improve energy porfolio allocation.