Repeat Visitation and Spending at Events: Hogs and Muscle Cars
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Transcript Repeat Visitation and Spending at Events: Hogs and Muscle Cars
Repeat Visitation and Spending at
Events: Hogs and Muscle Cars
Jennifer Beedle
Erick Byrd
UNCG
Road Map
Festival and Special Event Tourism
Economic Enhancement
Visitor Spending at Festivals and Special Events
Repeat Visitors vs. First Time Visitors
The Study
Purpose and Methods
Preliminary Results and Conclusions
Festival and Special Event Tourism
Rural communities look to enhance the area through
tourism.
Festivals and special events are a large component of the
tourism product in rural areas.
Understanding characteristics of the special event and festival
visitor is key to achieving economic goals.
Repeat visitors vs. First-time visitors
Repeat vs. First Time Visitors
Who Spends More?
First-time Visitors
Spend more money than
repeat visitors (Alegre and
Juaneda, 2006), (Petrick,
2004)
Participate in more tourist
activities (Donnegan, 2004).
Repeat Visitors
Stay longer in a destination
and spend more money.
(Donnegan, 2004)
The Study
Purpose
To investigate if repeat visitation has an influence on
visitors’ spending during events in a rural setting.
Surry County, North Carolina
Surry County, NC
Method
Data was gathered from two events in Surry
County, North Carolina
Convenience sampling via visitor intercept
N=394
Results
Average party size attending one of the two events
consisted of mostly adults.
3.4 adults
.06 children
The majority of visitors (80%) spent at least one night
in the area.
Most (75%) of the visitors stayed in hotels or motels.
Average travel party spending was $661 goods and
services in Surry County.
Results
53% First-time visitors
47% Repeat visitors
First-time visitors spent significantly more in
every spending category than repeat visitors,
excluding taxi and other.
Results
Test of Significance Between First-time and Repeat Visitor Spending (T-test)
Spending
Category
Mean FirsttimeVisitor
N=194
Mean Repeat
Visitor
N=163
t score
Probability
Hotel/Motel
$320
$142
-5.6
.000
Restaurant
$181
$118
-4
.000
Shopping
$144
$90
-3.2
.001
Entertainment
$50
$25
-3.3
.001
Automobile Ops $77
$45
-4.1
.000
Food & Supplies $44
$27
-2.3
.021
Taxi
$0.80
$0.12
-1.6
.115
Other
$12
$16
.8
.433
Total Spent
$817.80
$463.12
-5.5
.000
Conclusions
Results confirm the findings of previous research
studies indicating first-time visitors spend more than
repeat visitors.
Familiarity with location
More efficient spending
Redundancy of experiences
Access to discounts and rewards
Conclusions
It is vital for events to attract new visitors from year to
year.
Creating and keeping repeat visitors is still critical
More effective and efficient from a marketing
standpoint.
Mix of first-time and repeat visitors should be seen as
the ideal
Future research should identify whether or not this holds
true for other events or if it is destination specific.
Questions?