Purpose
The purpose of this study is to implement an innovative approach to analyze children’s impact on family decisions. Furthermore, a new strategy to collect children’s preferences is shown to reduce the lack of children’s voices in the tourism literature.
Design/methodology/approach
A stated preference (SP) experiment with a two-step procedure is applied: in the first step, children’s preferences are collected through pictures and a rating scale based on emoticons; in the second step, the SP is submitted to their parents to understand how children influence decisions. Parents faced six choice tasks, each of them showing three different activities that they could evaluate on the basis of three attributes: the cost of the activity, the distance from the place of interview and children’s degree of satisfaction in participating in the activity.
Findings
The majority of children interviewed show a high preference for swimming pool/lido, and their preference is highly taken into account by parents. Parents prefer closer and cheaper activities, but children’s preferences play a fundamental role in the final choice. In addition, parents are willing to pay an extra 100 CHF, for the whole family, to choose an activity that fulfills children’s preferences, rather than an activity that children do not like.
Originality/value
The originality contribution of this paper consists of using an innovative procedure to collect children’s preferences and combine them in an SP experiment submitted to their parents. Children’s influence on decisions is also measured by parent’s willingness to pay to satisfy their preferences.
With the increasing number of critical events happening at tourism destinations, travelers engage in different strategies to reduce travel risks, and travel insurance purchase is one of these. However, little is known about travel insurance purchase behavior despite its relevance in the modern context of travelers’ heightened alert induced by potential or actual risks of critical events. The present study applies an Integrated Choice and Latent Variable (ICLV) model to investigate individual insurance purchase decisions in a leisure travel context. A mix of sociodemographic covariates, travel-related behaviors, and psychological variables is adopted in the model. Personality traits are crucial for the purchase of products that are strongly related to the psychological dimension of individuals’ choice behavior. The results show that personality traits of conscientiousness and neuroticism contribute to the determination of travel insurance purchase behavior.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.