Transcript Chapter 2

Chapter 4
Analysing the Demand for Tourist
Travel
1
Contents and Chapter outline
• Introduction
• The international demand for tourist travel understanding why people travel
• Tourist travel motivators
• Classifying tourists
• Motivation, tourist transport research and
psychological issues
• Tourist transport research and psychological
issues
• Data sources on international tourist travel
• Aviation, Rail, Bus / Coach and Cruise statistics
• Forecasting the demand for tourist transport
2
Introduction
• Leisure travel has become a key feature of the
leisure society that now characterises many
developed countries and is also beginning to
affect developing countries as their middle
classes develop the travel.
• Tourist travel has become a global activity and it
is assuming a much greater role in the leisure
habits of developed societies now that/holidays
and overseas travel have become much more
accessible to all sections of the population.
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Introduction
• Large sections of society in developing countries do
not have such access, since their daily lives revolve
around meeting their everyday needs such as food,
shelter, health, water and employment.
• Even though this situation is changing for some
segments of the population in newly industrialising
nations (India, Brasil, Thailand etc.), it is not the norm.
• In many western nations, tourist travel has been
accompanied by the time-space compression, where
perceived access to places on a global scale now
seems much easier.
4
Introduction
• The growth in travel also poses many challenges for
the transport industry since understanding the
demand for tourist transport is a critical part of the
strategic planning process for transport operators
and organisations associated with the management
and marketing of transport services for tourists.
• At government level, accurate information on the use
of tourist transport infrastructure is critical when
formulating transport policies and particularly in
assessing the future demand by mode(s) of transport.
5
Introduction
• At the level of individual transport operators, it is
necessary to have a clear understanding of the
existing and likely patterns of demand for tourist
transport, to ensure that they are able to meet
the requirements of tourists, particularly during
the peak demand period.
• This means that for transport providers highquality market intelligence and statistical
information are vital in the strategic planning
process and day-to-day management, so that the
services offered are responsive and carefully
targeted at demand, cost effective and efficient.
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Introduction
• Ultimately, most transport companies seek to
operate services on a commercial basis so that
supply matches demand as closely as possible,
but there are also situations in which such
services are subsidised to meet social objectives
not related to tourism.
• In such situations, tourism is really an added
bonus for subsidised services such as rail, bus or
air services to more remote and peripheral
regions with a highly seasonal tourism industry.
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Introduction
The types of information required by decision-makers
associated with tourist transport provision are usually
gathered through the marketing research process and
are likely to include the following;
• the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics
of tourist travel demand (e.g.age, sex, family status,
social class, income and expenditure)
• the geographical origin and spatial distribution of
demand in the generating region
• the geographical preferences, consumer behaviour
and images of tourists for holiday destinations and
tourist travel habits, including the duration of visit.
(next page)
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Introduction - information required
• when it is likely to occur (e.g. temporal and seasonal
distributions of use)
• who is likely to organise the holiday (e.g. independently
or as part of a package)
• the choice of transport likely to be used in the tourist
transport system
• future patterns of demand (e.g. short- and long-term
forecasts of tourist travel)
• government policy towards tourist transport operations
• the implications of tourist travel demand for
infrastructure provision and investment in tourist modes
of transport (e.g. aircraft, airports, passenger liners,
ferries and ports).
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Introduction
• The purpose of this chapter is to examine a
range of the main types of data sources
available to assess the demand for tourist
transport at different spatial scales, from the
world scale down to individual countries.
• International and domestic sources of data are
introduced for transport and tourism, with the
emphasis on the relative merits and
weaknesses of each source.
• The discussion here is more focused on
transporting the tourist
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The international demand for tourist travel:
understanding why people travel
• Authors discuss the economic determinants of
tourism demand that are associated with the
purchase of an intangible service, usually a
holiday or transport service, as an experience.
• The consumption of tourist transport services as
part of a package holiday, or as a separate service
to meet a specific need, has manifested itself on
a global scale in terms of the worldwide growth
in international tourist travel.
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understanding why people travel
• Among the economic determinants of the growth
in international tourism are rising disposable
incomes and increased holiday entitlement in
developed countries.
• Transport operators have stimulated demand by
more competitive pricing of air travel and other
forms of travel for international tourists.
• This has been accompanied by the
'internationalisation' and 'globalisation' of
tourism as a business activity
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The international demand for tourist travel:
understanding why people travel
• As global tourism operators emerge through
mergers, takeovers, strategic alliances
investment in overseas destinations and
diversification into other tourism services.
• One consequence is that tourist transport
operators view the determinants of tourist
travel as crucial to their short and long-term
plans for service provision.
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The international demand for tourist travel:
understanding why people travel
• While internationalisation was primarily about
international links and operations,
globalisation is a more embracing notion,
which involves a different form of organisation
and cuts across conventional concepts like the
nation-state.
• Globalisation has had a profound effect on
transport and tourism because it has aided the
interconnectivity of places physically and
remotely using new information
communication technologies.
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The international demand for tourist travel
• Aside from the economic determinants of the
demand for travel, the significance of
psychological determinants of demand in
explaining some of the reasons why tourists
travel also discovered.
• Analysis of tourist travel motivators (excluding
business travel) identifies reasons commonly
cited to explain why people travel to tourist
destinations for holidays.
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Tourist Travel Motivators
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Tourist Travel Motivators
These motivators include;
• A desire to escape from a mundane environment
• The pursuit of relaxation and recuperation (recovery)
functions
• An opportunity for play
• The strengthening of family bonds (ties)
• Prestige, since different destinations can enable one
to gain social enhancement among peers
• Social interaction
• Educational opportunities
• Wish fulfilment (completion)
• Shopping
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Classifying tourists
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Classifying tourists
• Although it is possible to identify a range of
motivators, it is also possible to classify
tourists according to the type of holiday they
are seeking and the travel experience they
desire.
• For example, Eric Cohen (1972) distinguished
between four types of tourist travellers as the
organised mass tourist, the individual mass
tourist, the explorers and the drifters
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Classifying tourists
• Clearly such a classification is fraught (full) with
problems, since it does not take into account
the increasing diversity of holidays undertaken
and inconsistencies in tourist behaviour
• Some researchers suggest that one way of
overcoming this difficulty is to consider the
different destinations tourists choose to visit,
• Pearce (1992) produces a convincing argument
that highlights the importance of considering
the tourists destination choice.
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Tourist Motivations
• As a result, tourism demand should not be
equated with tourism motivation.
• Tourism demand is the outcome of tourists'
motivation as well as marketing, destination
features and contingency (chance) factors such
as money, health and time relating to the
travellers' choice behaviour.
• Tourism demand can be expressed as the sum
of realistic behavioural intentions to visit a
specific location
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understanding why people travel
• Tourist motivation is then a part rather than
the equivalent of tourism demand
• In other words, transport providers need to
recognise the traveller's choice, behaviour and
travel intentions at destinations to understand
fully the wider transport requirements beyond
simple aggregate patterns of travel statistics
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Motivation, tourist transport research and
psychological issues
• Motivation has been described as one of the
principal explanations of why people travel and, in
its purest sense, motivation is the driving force
behind human actions
• 'motivation is also about the causes of personal
action in tourism and other activities‘
• It is therefore the starting point for studying tourist
behaviour and beyond that for understanding
systems of tourism including the use of transport
modes
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tourist transport research and psychological issues
The literature on tourist transport is significantly
different from the prevailing economic analysis of
behaviour since;
• it focuses on the traveller and different markets to
examine the different travel choices made in
relation to leisure and tourism
• it considers traveller choices and mode of travel,
which may be multi-modal during any tourist trip
and have a great deal less predictability than
commuter travel behaviour in time, space and
modal use
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tourist transport research and psychological issues
• the relevant literature on this area of motivation
and the psychology of mode of tourist travel in
relation to a number of areas of research
including visitor satisfaction and benchmarking of
service provision along with more qualitative
approaches to route mapping by visitors has
been identified.
• In addition, trip planning, route choice and the
activities of specific market segments such as the
senior market have attracted attention.
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tourist transport research and psychological issues
• The social psychology of travel
is clearly a complex area
• For ex., an analysis of tourist
choice of travel mode among
Dutch travellers suggests; lifecycle factors and use of the
car for domestic trips is
important but number of
children and use of
accommodation affect modal
choice.
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tourist transport research and psychological issues
• Figure 4.1 is a very helpful framework
which examines the tourist-transport
interface from a motivation perspective
that reinforces many of the arguments
that a continuum exists ranging from no
travel in some cases to transport and
tourism through transport for tourism
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Figure 4.1: Conceptual map of the links between motivation, life-cycle, transport roles and the trevellers
experience
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tourist transport research and psychological issues
• The figure emphasises the significance of lifecycle factors and group motivation into core and
additional emphases, developing a classification
of the multiple roles of transport, where
different experiences result.
• These are a complex series of interactions where
the style of travel is shaped by numerous
motivational factors, and even with a mode of
travel such as car-based transport.
• Figure 4.1 illustrates that different factors
motivate the self-drive market versus the nonself-drive market amongst car-borne travellers.
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tourist transport research and psychological issues
• The implication of such research on motivation
and demand is that governments and transport
operators need to recognise what economic,
social and psychological factors are stimulating
tourist travel.
• All too often the social and psychological
perspectives have been overlooked in economic
analyses of travel
• But we do not forget that 'No single paradigm or
model is likely to explain all tourism behaviour. No
single typology is likely to have more than specific
relevance'.
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tourist transport research and psychological issues
• This may help in establishing the different types
of travellers and their preferences for various
destinations and specific activity patterns on
holiday.
• Tour operators selling holidays need to recognise
the complexity of tourist motivation to travel and
airlines need to understand the precise effect on
the availability of aircraft.
• In particular, they must be able to rotate and
interchange different aircraft in a fleet to meet
daily and seasonal travel requirements through
complex logistical exercises.
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tourist transport research and psychological issues
• As suggested by the authors, 'tourism is in fact both
multi-motivational and made up of multiple groups of
tourists, many of whom are experienced as tourists and
versatile (multi dimentional) in their use of tourism'.
• This also means that infrastructures such as airports
have to consider future investment and development
plans.
• More specifically, transport operators will need to
understand the range of motives and expectations of
certain types of traveller since the level of service they
provide will need to match the market and the
requirements of travellers.
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Data sources on international tourist travel
• The analysis of tourism, tourists and their propensity to
travel and previous travel patterns is 'a complex process
involving not only the visitor and his movements but also
the destination and host community‘.
• Tourist transport providers will often have statistical
information relating to their own organisation's services
and tourist use. But, there are some questions as;
 How can a new entrant into the tourist transport
business examine the feasibility of providing a transport
service?
 What statistical information on tourist transport is
available?
 How is it gathered? and
 Who publishes it?
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Data sources on international tourist travel
• On a global scale, there are vast differences in
the availability of transport, indeed there is a
stark(entire) contrast between a relatively
immobile Third World and the highly mobile
advanced economies ... much of the
infrastructure is poorly maintained and in
disrepair (bad) and is inadequate for present
needs without the complication of growth of
demand in the future
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Data sources on international tourist travel
• The global discrepancies (paradoxes) that exist in
transport provision obviously have a major
impact on the tourism-generating potential
and patterns of demand which result
• One of the best sources to document such
trends is the United Nations Statistical
Yearbook, which records much of the growth
in car ownership worldwide
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Data sources on international tourist travel
• An abstract of air transport and tourism data
for selected Asian countries is shown in Table
4.1, which highlights many of the data
problems of gaps in information and the
problems of linking transport and tourism
data together, although it does help to
demonstrate underlying patterns of growth
where data exists
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Aviation statistics
• One immediate problem that confronts the
researcher interested in tourist transport is the
absence of international statistics which monitor
every mode of tourist travel on an up-to-date basis.
• For example, organisations such as the International
Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and International
Air Transport Association (IATA) publish annual
statistics on international air travel for their
members' airline operations.
• In the case of ICAO, its 2007 Annual Report
summarises the state of airline operations for the
190 contracting states, which are:
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Aviation statistics
• In 2007, the world's airlines carried 2,260 million
passengers, a rise of 5.5 % on 2006, which equates to a 6
% rise in international air traffic and a 4 %rise in domestic
traffic.
• The traffic was distributed between North American
airlines (33 %), Asia-Pacific airlines (29%), European
airlines (27 %), Latin American, Caribbean and Middle
Eastern airlines with 4 % each, and S.American airlines
with 2 % of the traffic.
• The trend in passenger loadings had grown from 65 % in
1993 to 71 % in 2002 with a drop in 2001 to 69 % largely
due to the after-effects of 9/11 rising to 76 % in 2006 and
77 % in 2007.
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Aviation statistics
• In 2007, 41 % of scheduled traffic volumes (including
freight and mail) were dominated by airlines based in
the USA (31 % ), Germany (5 %), the UK (5 % ) and
Japan (6 %) with large domestic markets.
• For international scheduled traffic, the market was
dominated by American airlines (17 %), Germany and
the UK (7 % each) and Japan (6 %).
• The issue of airline profitability has become a massive
one for many airlines, especially in the USA.
• This is because since 9/11 the global airline industry
reported losses for each year up to the end of 2006.
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Aviation statistics
• The most successful airlines in 2003 (i.e. those in net
profit) were those with a diversified portfolio of
passenger and freight business (e.g. Lufthansa,
Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific), with some heightonly operators (e.g. Federal Express) although what is
notable is the dominance of Asian operators in the
Top 25 despite the impact of SARS.
• This reflects their overall productivity and lower
cost basis.
• Airlines Asian carriers, notably Singapore Airlines
had lower unit costs than major US carriers
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Aviation statistics
• In terms of the scale of passenger activity at the
world's major airports, data for the top 10
airports in 2003 based on data from Airport
Council International highlights the dominance
of US airports and a number of European hubs,
but in contrast to 2004, Beijing now enters as a
major airport in ninth place.
• The data is unable to identify tourist and leisure
trips, being a broad measure of terminal
passengers and international travel.
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46
Bus and Coach Travel
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Bus and Coach Travel
• In contrast to air transport, road based bus and
coach travel is rarely documented with the exception
of the UN Statistics Yearbook, which provides a
generic overview.
• Coach travel usually refers to inter-urban, rural or
urban-based trips.
• There is a number of distinct forms of bus/coach
service exist for tourists including their use of
domestic and international scheduled coach
services, coaches for group travel and different
companies who use coaches and buses for
sightseeing in destinations.
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Bus and Coach Travel
• In recent years, innovations in the destination
sightseeing services have seen all-day excursions
operating on a hop on/hop off basis as well as
the development of dedicated airport shuttle
services and tailor-made services.
• At the EU level, the Energy and Transport in
Figures documents trends since 1970 and other
useful studies are Jane's Urban Transport
Systems Handbook along with many of the
periodicals published on the bus and coach
industry that provide market intelligence.
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Bus and Coach Travel
• On a global scale, however, the most useful is the
data generated by the Union lnternationale des
Transport Publics (www.uitp.com) and the data
from individual operators (where it exists).
• The scale of this industry in the EU is often
underestimated, some of which is supported by
tourism since the bus and coach sector employs
around 10 million people; although with a few
notable exceptions, it remains a poorly
understood sector by researchers
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Bus and Coach Travel
According to the North West Regional Developments
Agency (NWRDA) study in 2008 on Coach Tourism in
England's North West, the' coach market was
predominantly based upon 60-70 year old travellers
who:
• took 2 million trips a year to the region
• spent £ 120 million a year as a result of coach
tourism in the region
• accounted for around 1:20 of all domestic staying
trips in North West England
• visited two dominant locations: Blackpool (50 % )
and the Lake Distric (30 %).
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Bus and Coach Travel
• The market has seen increased pressure from
low-cost airlines although the luxury end of
the market still has considerable potential for
growth along with special interest tours (e.g.
seeing behind the film set of popular drama series).
• Combined with forecasts of an ageing
population, the NWRDA report suggests this
may be an opportunity for the coach market
along with the increasing inwestment in
higher specification vehicles.
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Rail travel statistics
• Rail travel is comparatively well documented with
a number of annual surveys (e.g. Jane's World
Railways, United Nation's reports) and data from the
UIC, which is the worldwide railway association.
• Other studies such as the OECD's (2002) Trends
in the Transport Sector 1970-2000 and OECD
(2005) OECD in Figures 2005 - Transport provide
useful time series data, as do the EU's Energy and
Transport in Figures.
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Cruising and ferry transport statistics
• The United Nations Statistics Yearbook is a good
starting point for maritime transport, but there
are clear differences between what is a
tourism-only activity (e.g. cruising) and the use
of ferries to cross natural barriers (e.g. seas and
lakes) for tourism and non-tourism purposes.
• Most governments provide statistical data on
ferry crossings that are compiled from
government and private-sector owned ports and
services.
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Tourism statistics
Within an international context, tourism statistics
provide an invaluable insight into:
• tourist arrivals in different regions of the world
and for specific countries
• the volume of tourist trips
• types of tourism (e.g. holidaymaking, visiting
friends and relatives and businesstravel)
• the number of nights spent in different countries
by tourists
• tourist expenditure on transport-related services.
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Tourism statistics
• Such information may indicate the order of
magnitude of tourist use of transport systems and
their significance in different locations
• Unlike respondents in other forms of social survey
work, tourists are a transient' and mobile
population.
• This raises problems related to which social survey
method and sampling technique one should use to
generate reliable and accurate statistical
information that is representative of the real
world.
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Tourism statistics
It is possible to discern (recognise) three common
types of tourism survey:
• pre-travel studies of tourists' intended travel
habits and likely use of tourist transport;
• studies of tourists in transit or at their
destination, to provide information on their
actual behaviour and plans for the remainder of
their holiday or journey;
• post-travel studies of tourists once they have
returned to their place of residence.
Clearly there are advantages and disadvantages
with each approach.
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Tourism statistics
• Pre-travel studies may indicate the potential
destinations that tourists would like to visit on their
next holiday, but it is difficult to assess the extent to
which holiday intentions are converted to actual travel.
• In contrast post-travel studies are used, they often
incur the problem of actually locating and eliciting
responses from tourists that accurately record a
previous event or experience .
• Each approach has a valuable role and generally
individual transport operators and tourism
organisations use the approach appropriate to their
information needs
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Tourism statistics
• The most comprehensive and widely used
sources of tourism statistics that directedly and
indirectly examine international tourist travel
are produced by the UN-World Tourism
Organization (WTO) and OECD.
• National governments also compile statistics on
international tourism for their own country
(inbound travel) and the destinations chosen by
outbound travellers.
• These are normally commissioned by national
tourism organisations as a specialist research
function.
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Tourism statistics
WTO publishes a number of annual publications,
including the Yearbook of Tourism Statistics which
includes statistical information in the following
order:
• world summary of international tourism statistics
• tourist arrivals
• accommodation capacity by regions
• trends in world international tourism arrivals,
receipts and exports
• arrivals of cruise passengers(next p.)
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Tourism statistics
• domestic tourism
• tourism payments (including international tourism
receipts by countries calculated in US $ millions,
excluding international fare receipts)
• tourism motivations (arrivals from abroad and
purpose of visit)
• tourism accommodation
• country studies that examine the detailed
breakdown of tourism statistics collected for each
area, including tourism seasonality
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Forecasting the demand for tourist transport
• Forecasting the demand for tourist transport is
essential for commercial operators, 'whether in
the public or private sector as they will seek to
maximise revenue and profits in moving towards
maximum efficiency in [their] use of resources‘
• A manager must plan for the future in order to
minimise the risk of failure or, more
optimistically, to maximise the possibilities of
success.
• In order to plan, he must use forecasts
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Forecasting the demand for tourist transport
• Forecasts will always be made, whether by
guesswork, teamwork or the use of complex
models, and the accuracy of the forecasts will
affect the quality of the management decision.
• Reliable forecasts are essential for managers and
decision-makers involved in service provision
within the tourist transport system to try and
ensure adequate supply is available to meet
demand, while avoiding oversupply, since this can
erode the profitability of their operation
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Forecasting the demand for tourist transport
• In essence, forecasts of tourism demand are
essential for efficient planning by airlines,
shipping companies, railways, coach oper
ators, hoteliers, tour operators.
• Forecasting is the process associated with an
assessment of future changes in the demand
for tourist transport.
• It must be stressed that 'forecasting is not an
exact science'
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Forecasting the demand for tourist transport
The principal methods of forecasting are:
• 'the projection by extrapolation, of historic
trends' (i.e. how the previous performance of demand
may shape future patterns)
• extrapolation, subject to the application of ...
[statistical analysis using] weights or variables'
• and structured group discussions among a
panel of tourism transport experts may be
used to assess factors determining future
traffic forecasts (known as the Delphi method)
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Forecasting the demand for tourist transport
A. Bull classifies the quantitative techniques forecasters
use in terms of the degree of statistical and mathematical
complexity based on:
• time-series analysis of trends (e.g. seasonality in
travel), which involve simple statistical calculations to
consider how past trends may be replicated in the
future;
• economic theory models, used in econometrics
The important issue to recognise here is that in
forecasting, a number of variables are examined which
relate to factors directly and indirectly influencing tourist
travel.
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Forecasting the demand for tourist transport
These variables are considered according to their
statistical relationship with each other. A.Bull notes
that the most common variables used are:
• number of tourist trips;
• total tourist expenditure and expenditure per
capita;
• market shares of tourism;
• the tourism sector's share of gross domestic
product (GDP).
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Forecasting the demand for tourist transport
• Depending on the complexity of the methodology
employed, the forecasting model may examine
one dependent variable (e.g. tourist trips) and how
other independent variables (e.g. the state of the
national and international economy, leisure time, levels
of disposable income, inflation and foreign exchange
rates) affect the demand for tourist trips.
• This can be used to assess how the demand for
tourist transport will change on a global basis and
within different countries over the next decade.
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Forecasting the demand for tourist transport
• Ultimately, forecasting attempts to establish how
consumer demand for tourist transport has
shaped previous trends and how these may
change in the future, often over a 5- to 10-year
period.
• On a world scale, the detailed study by Edwards
and Graham (2000) Long Term Tourism Forecasts
to the Year 2005, and subsequent updates,
remains an invaluable and widely cited source
that examines the future demand for tourism.
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End of Chapter slides
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