Abstract Coastal hotels in the Mediterranean represent critical tourism infrastructure increasingly exposed to interacting chronic and acute climate hazards. As a climate change hotspot, the region faces significant risks, including rising temperatures, droughts, extreme precipitation, wildfires, strong winds, and sea-level rise, which are amplified by dense coastal urbanization and high tourism concentration. This study develops a structured typology of climate-related impacts and adaptation responses for coastal hotels based on an extensive literature review and organized within a Climate Risk and Vulnerability Assessment framework. Coastal hotels are conceptualized as interconnected socio-technical systems and decomposed into key components, including guests, infrastructure, supporting systems (e.g., power, HVAC, ICT, water, transport, and supply chains), and outputs, allowing systematic mapping of hazard–impact–response chains. Fourteen climate hazards are identified and organized into six groups: temperature increase and heat, drought and aridity, extreme precipitation and floods, wildfires, strong winds, and coastal hazards including sea-level rise, coastal flooding and erosion, and saline intrusion. Results show that climate change affects coastal hotels through infrastructure damage, resource stress, operational disruption, environmental degradation, and declining destination attractiveness. Climate risks are often cascading, as disruptions in energy, water, or transport systems can compromise hotel operations even without direct building damage. Adaptation measures include structural retrofitting, nature-based coastal protection, resource-efficient technologies, renewable energy integration, water management strategies, and organizational preparedness. The resulting typology provides a systematic basis for integrating tourism infrastructure into climate risk assessments and supports climate-resilient and resource-efficient planning for coastal hotels in the Mediterranean and other tourism regions.
Stamou et al. (Mon,) studied this question.