A study of visitors' leisure travel behavior in the northwest territories of Canada

Abstract

As long-distance leisure travel has shifted to being broader and more of an amalgam of different activity types, it has become critical for planners to understand what combinations of activities individuals will most likely participate in during a leisure trip. Accordingly, this study models travelers' participation in any combination of eight leisure trip activities. The analysis utilizes activity participation data from a tourist exit survey collected from the Northwest Territories in Canada. A Multivariate Binary Probit model system, with correlation across every pair of leisure activities, is estimated using a Composite Marginal Likelihood method. The empirical analysis results emphasize that travelers often combine specific sets of leisure activities together during tourism travel. However, which sets of activities get paired together depends greatly on travelers' experience, travel companions, and individual concerns.

Intra-destination travel behavior of alpine tourists: a literature review on choice determinants and the survey work

“…Moreover, their destination choice model for holiday trips is limited only to the winter season (skiing activities) and to the trips of Swiss citizens. An example of a more locally and less state-wide focused study is the one by LaMondia and Bhat (2013), who applied the Multivariate Binary Probit model to study the visitors' leisure travel behavior in Northwest Canada. Scarpa et al (2008) analyzed the destination choice of members of the Italian Alpine Club (CAI) for oneday outdoor trips in the Alps and discovered that, except travel cost, also difficulty of hiking trails and number of mountain huts influence the decisions, while Scarpa and Thiene (2004) concentrated only on climbers and mountaineers and found travel cost, severity of the environment and number of alpine shelters to be influential factors.…”

“…According to LaMondia and Bhat (2013), tourists tend to have a main purpose characterizing the long-distance activity component of their holiday trip, which then drives them to choose a particular destination and particular activities. The topic of holiday and leisure motivations has been intensively studied by many researchers who developed different measurement scales and items (Beard and Ragheb 1983;Crompton 1979;Iso-Ahola 1984;Ryan and Glendon 1998).…”

Travel behavior on vacation: transport mode choice of tourists at destinations

“…Eaton and Holding, 1996;Holding and Kreutner, 1998;Holding, 2001;Imhof et al, 2009;Alber et al, 2011;Verbeek et al, 2011;Ogrin, 2012;Heslinga et al, 2019). While they provide insights into administrative hurdles, describe the role of public sector and partnerships among stakeholders (Currie and Falconer, 2014;Guiver and Stanford, 2014;Stanford and Guiver, 2016), business models (Pronello and Camusso, 2017), funding (Guiver et al, 2013), or marketing (Dickinson and Dickinson, 2006;Gronau and Kagermeier, 2007) and may contribute to further discussions on sustainable travel at the destination, the nature of these studies makes them of limited use as a predictive tool, as noticed by LaMondia and Bhat (2013). They do however set challenging questions about the influence of modal shift on destination choice, visitor frequency and destination's revenue (Guiver et al, 2008), which could be addressed in quantitative studies.…”