Investigating tourists' destination choices - An application of network analysis

A better understanding of the complex destination choice process is highly relevant, both for academia and practice. Tourism research tends to focus either on actually executed or hypothetical destination choices. However, a discrepancy exists between these two types of destination choices which has hardly been investigated. Moreover, past research often studies tourists and their attitudes, needs or perceptions of destinations but not how destinations' attributes affect destination choices. To approach these two research gaps, this study concentrates not only on actual but also on hypothetical destination choices to better understand differences in the evaluation of alternative destinations. This study furthermore examines the role of the destination itself to discover the influence of destination characteristics on destination choices. Therefore, network analysis and set theory are combined in a new research approach which allows to analyse destination choices with varying closeness to reality whilst preserving destination information. The analysis is based on a quantitative survey of German tourists' travel decision-making behaviour. The results reveal changes in destination choices from multidimensional hypothetical choices to unidimensional actual and past choices. Furthermore, only few destinations have a consistent position whilst most destinations are either more relevant for hypothetical or actual destination choices. (C) 2017 Varna University of Management. All rights reserve

Reject or select: Mapping destination choice

The purpose of this study is to empirically explore tourists' destination choice processes. Destination choices are investigated using a combination of data on destinations and on tourists' individual destination choices. Data were collected in Munich/Germany in 2013 using personal interviews; 622 interviews were completed. This approach allows detecting reasons for the rejection or selection of certain types of destinations during the destination choice process. Results show that tourists often start the destination choice process with various combinations of destination types but act similarly when choosing the final destination. The investigation of tourist and destination characteristics results in a tourist typology that varies in regard to similarity and type of alternative destinations at different stages of the destination choice process. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved