Can tourism information flow enhance regional tourism economic linkages?

Although previous studies have highlighted the impact of tourist information searches and sharing on a tourism economy, few have investigated the relationship between tourism information flow and regional tourism economic linkages from a macro perspective. Accordingly, this study took China's Yangtze River Delta (YRD) urban agglomeration as the research object and combined big data samples from the Baidu Index and official regional statistics to fill this knowledge gap. A gravity model, spatial Durbin model (SDM) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) were also introduced to analyse the data. The results confirm that tourism information flow has a significant effect on regional tourism economic linkages and presents obvious spillover effects. However, these effects are short-term. Additionally, the best causal combinations for improving tourism economic linkages are identified, including high tourism information flow, urbanization, transportation convenience, tourism reception capacity, and tourism resource endowments, as well as limited industrial structures.