A theoretical analysis of preference matching by tourists and destination choice

Abstract

How does the phenomenon of preference matching by tourists affect their choice between two possible destinations? We study this question. It costs less (more) to vacation in destination (). Tourists choose to either vacation in or. They differ in their incomes. These incomes are uniformly distributed on the unit interval. Our analysis leads to four results. First, when the cost differential parameter satisfies a particular condition, both destinations are visited in the equilibrium. Second, when this parametric condition holds, in any equilibrium in which the mean income of the tourists varies across the two destinations, every tourist vacationing in has a lower income than every tourist vacationing in. Third, there exists an income cutoff point and all tourists with lower (higher) incomes choose to vacation in (). Finally, in the equilibrium with income sorting, it is possible to make all tourists better off by modifying their destination choices.

Trends in Destination Choice in Tourism Research: A 25-year Bibliometric Review

“…Decision constructs are used to rank an alternative with other competing ones into an overall preference list to make their final choice. Batabyal and Yoo (2020) support that preference matching by tourists can lead to different alternatives for DC when sorted by income difference.…”

“…In tourism, existing literature reviews cover topics such as leisure and hospitality domain (Mulet-Forteza et al, 2019), sustainable tourism (Streimikiene et al, 2021), psychological process of travel DC (Qiu et al, 2018), evaluating risk perception (Karl & Reintinger, 2017) and impact of preference matching with income groups (Batabyal & Yoo, 2020). However, hardly any studies have focused on carrying out quantitative analysis of the extant literature using bibliometric tools to review DC (Yuan et al, 2015) literature.…”

The effect of income on the relationship between travel motives and destination choices

“…The interdependence of push and pull factors has been investigated through a variety of methodologies (Katsikari et al 2020;Pandey & Joshi 2021;Pestana et al 2020) This article is therefore not unique in its attempt to study the relationship between travel motivations and destination choice. However, it attempts to determine how certain push motives change for specific destination choices considering income as a significant determinant of destination selection (Batabyal & Yoo 2020). Income has been cited as one of the most important barriers to travel, especially in developing countries (De Almeida & Kastenholz 2019;Rogerson 2020;Scott & Lee 2018;Stodolska, Shinew & Camarillo 2019).…”