Predictors of Repeat Winery Visitation in North Carolina

Wine tourism is a relatively fledging industry with a range of important economic development issues. One issue is the identification of key drivers of repeat business, in this case, intention to pay a return visit to a winery or wine region. The purpose of this study is to identify specific factors that may influence wine tourists’ intentions to revisit a winery or wine region in North Carolina. Exhaustive CHAID decision tree analysis was used to identify statistically significant visitor characteristics influencing respondents’ intentions to revisit a winery or wine region in North Carolina. Customer service and the importance it has to the visitors was found to be the best predictor of their intention to revisit

Airport Runway Slots: Limits to Growth

The United States–European Union market accounts for approximately 25% of all international tourist arrivals worldwide, and is arguably the busiest market in the world. This paper argues that landing slot policy and the manner in which airport capacity is allocated among airlines across the north Atlantic is likely to underpin the future geographic structure of the tourism industry. By analyzing the historical evolution of slot policy, this paper attempts to enhance the extant literature on how government authorities allocate scarce airport resources. The paper concludes by arguing that various slot reform proposals need to be adopted to make airports more “elastic” when managing origin-destination tourist flows

Spatial Patterns of Visitor Behavior: A Case Study of the North Carolina Zoological Park

This paper explains the spatial patterns of visitor behavior at the North Carolina Zoological Park (NCZP). The NCZP is one of the top ten tourist attractions in the state, but it is unclear what factors influence each individual 's decision to visit the zoo. The research reported in this paper partially confirmed many of the theoretical expectations about visitor behavior. Based on the results of a visitor survey, the NCZP is a family attraction that caters to a largely well-educated and affluent audience. Most of those surveyed came from the nearby urban centers, while the rural counties immediately adjacent to the NCZP did not generate a large number of visitors, in part due to their smaller populations. Individuals may also require a threshold in distance travelled before a recreational day-trip becomes a meaningful experience. Visitors w ith above average income levels were more likely to travel greater distances to visit the NCZP, while education played a less significant role in explaining distance travelled. Although the NCZP is a statefunded institution, visitors from the extreme eastern and western parts of the state are not well -represented. The remoteness and largely rural nature of the economy in these parts of the state, and the lower income levels of individuals from these counties, may act to constrain individual mobility

The Geography of Air Freight: Connections to U.S. Metropolitan Economies

Despite the rapid growth of air freight shipments, much of the existing literature on the geography of air transportation has paid more attention to passenger travel than air freight. The purpose of this paper is to elevate our understanding of air freight by determining which specific variables most influence and shape the geographic distribution of air freight by metropolitan area using stepwise regression analysis. The empirical results suggest a regression model of five independent variables was the most parsimonious solution where the final model accounted for 71.1% of the variation in air freight shipments by metropolitan area (MA). The most important predictor was the traffic shadow effect, where less populated MAs under the traffic shadow of larger MAs tended to generate lower levels of freight. The model also suggested that other key predictors included the employment market share in transportation-shipping-logistics industries, per capita personal income, the number of medical diagnostic and supplier establishments, and above average wages in high technology. Overall, metropolitan markets with diverse and efficient ground support systems, freight forwarders and other transportation services, a more affluent population, an intense agglomeration of medical laboratories and related suppliers, and a well paid skilled workforce engaged in computer systems design and electronic product manufacturing are more likely to ship freight by air

The Geography of Air Passenger Volume and Local Employment Patterns by U.S. Metropolitan Core Area: 1973-1996

The purpose of this paper is to determine if a statistically significant relationship exists between administrative and auxiliary employment levels and air passenger volume for the top 50 urban-airport complexes in the United States from 1973 to 1996. The goal of this paper is a fairly modest one — to refine and expand the current literature's focus by conducting a broader investigation of the links that exist between air passenger volume and employment levels within local economies. Based on data from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the US Census Bureau County Business Patterns, the major findings of this paper were that the correlation between administrative and auxiliary employment and enplaned passenger volume over time are statistically significant at the 1% level

Air Transportation and Urban-Economic Restructuring: Competitive Advantage in the U.S. Carolinas

The theoretical agenda of this paper is to bring airports and airline operations more squarely into the mainstream of the urban and regional development literature. The paper examines the spatial and temporal patterns of air passenger flows by airport in the US Carolinas. An emphasis is placed on articulating the linkages that exist between airport operations at the local level, the structural composition of the regional economy, and the competitive strategies of the airline industry. Particular attention was paid to administrative and auxiliary employment levels because it is a knowledge-based producer service that tends to seek out markets that offer high levels of air service connectivity to other places. A major finding in this paper is that those US Carolina airports that experienced significant gains in air passenger volume (e.g., Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham) tended to experience comparable gains in the employment levels of administrative and auxiliary workers, particularly in the manufacturing sector

Spatial Behavior in a Bahamian Resort

The purpose of this study is to understand better the spatial behavior of tourists visiting spatially confined resort destinations. Based on a time-budget study of the intradestination travel patterns of 795 tourists visiting Paradise Island (Bahamas), the travel behavior of tourists was found to be heterogeneous. The spatial equivalent of the allocentric tourist seemed more likely to venture beyond the Paradise Island resort area during their stay. Only the psychocentric tourist seemed reluctant to leave the island under any conditions. In the context of international resort tourism, the space-time constraints are found to be more important than the socioeconomic descriptors in explaining the different typologies of spatial behavior

Industry Knowledge Sources and the Role of Universities

In recent years, rapid growth has occurred in both the number and diversity of university-industry programs in the United States. While little comprehensive assessment of these programs exists to date, this paper argues that a systematic empirical analysis of a company's perception of universities as knowledge sources is critical to a clear understanding of the new alliances between industry and academia. From a survey of 216 companies, a pattern emerges where the sources of technical knowledge perceived as important by industry are complex and highly interrelated, and they also vary according to the characteristics of companies, especially size. It is seen that university research rather than universities as institutions per se are critical ingredients to the development of new products and production processes

Wealth Generation in Metropolitan America: FIRE as Savior?

The current restructuring of the American economy from goods producing industry to service providing industry has been a focus of concern for many social scientists. While some argue in favor of the rapidly expanding service sector, pointing out that growth in services creates employment and generates income, others emphasize that many service sector jobs pay considerably less than comparable manufacturing sector jobs, which continue to be lost in many metropolitan areas. The Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (F.I.R .E.) industry in particular, is a branch of the service sector that is often associated with the generation of affluence and productivity. This paper examines the importance of the F.I.R.E. industry in 57 Primary Metropolitan Statistical Areas and 3 New England County Metropolitan Areas, and discusses how agglomeration in this industry mayor may not be related to per capita income in these Metropolitan Area

Renewable Energy in North Carolina: The Potential Supply Chain and Connections to Existing Renewable and Energy Efficient Firms

Although our understanding of industry cluster dynamics is fairly well developed, it is less clear whether renewable energy firms and related potential suppliers co-locate in similar ways to other more established industries. Consequently, this paper should be primarily viewed as a first step in disentangling the co-locational tendencies of the renewable industry and related potential suppliers. Based on methodology and data developed by the Renewable Energy Policy Project and the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association, we find that the geography of the potential renewable suppliers is tightly concentrated along the I-85 corridor between Charlotte, the Triad and the Research Triangle region with significant outposts in Hickory, Wilmington and especially Asheville. It also appears that the potential suppliers have co-locational preferences that overlap significantly with actual renewable energy and energyefficiency firms already located in North Carolina. Less well understood is how these potential suppliers and renewable/energy-efficiency firms inter-relate regarding both potential knowledge spillover effects and the formation of formal and informal networks of production—a key area for future research