Lingling Wu

A Tourist's Multi-Destination Choice Model with Future Dependency

This study is concerned with the interrelated choices underlying a tourists multi-destination behavior. A new destination choice model is developed based on the concept of future dependence, which argues that choice of a destination during a tour is influenced by choices of other destinations that will be visited later. The model is built within the universal (or mother) logit model framework and it is especially suitable to represent the choice behavior with many destinations, which are difficult to represent using a traditional nested logit model. The results of analysis empirically confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed modeling approach, using questionnaire survey data collected in Tottori Prefecture, Japan in 2007. It was also revealed that travel time, diversity of destination, and variety-seeking remarkably affect the multi-destination choice behavior.

Dynamic Analysis of Japanese Tourists’ Three Stage Choices: Tourism Participation, Destination Choice, and Travel Mode Choice

Finding ways to encourage people to participate in domestic tourism has been a central political issue in Japan for many years. One issue is the unbalanced regional trend in domestic tourist destinations. Various transport policies have been proposed. Under such policy considerations, jointly representing tourism participation, destination choice, and travel mode choice becomes important. However, tourism demand shows monthly variations. To date, the above three aspects have not been satisfactorily analyzed in a dynamic fashion. This study seeks to gain a better understanding of interrelated tourist behavior and provide a scientific tool to support tourism policy decisions by jointly analyzing these choice aspects to build a dynamic nested logit model while taking the influence of state dependence into account. Empirical analysis confirmed the effectiveness of the model with the use of retrospective panel survey data collected from 1,253 respondents in Japan in 2010. To the authors’ best knowledge, this was the first panel survey in Japan to investigate tourists’ behavior over the course of 1 year on a monthly basis. Model estimation results confirmed significantly negative effects of state dependence with respect to tourism participation behavior (implying a decreasing tendency of continuous tourism participation at the monthly level), but positive effects with respect to destination and travel mode choice behaviors. The positive value of state dependence for the travel mode choice behavior suggests that people prefer to use the same type of travel modes when they travel. The influence of travel mode choice on destination choice shows largely regional variations. Results also clarified effects of tourism motivation, individual characteristics, destination-specific attributes, and travel mode–specific attributes on the three choice aspects. Implications of model estimations for policy decisions are discussed.

Tourist adaptation behavior in response to climate disasters in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT To assess the impacts of climate disasters on the behavior of tourists in Bangladesh, this study makes an initial attempt to investigate tourists’ adaptation behavior in response to climate disasters. A questionnaire survey was developed and administered to address both tourists’ previous adaptation behavior and their stated adaptation behavior in response to different future climate disasters. The choice modeling analysis of tourists’ previous behavior revealed that a cyclone is more likely to result in the cancellation of a trip, and a flood is more likely to result in a change in trip timing. As for the stated behavior analysis, it was confirmed that most variables related to disaster severity show significant influence on adaptation behavior. The results also indicate that construction of disaster-resilient transportation networks is essential to avoid trip cancellations. In addition, improving market-oriented tourism service quality in Bangladesh could play a significant role in reducing the probability of both trip cancellations and changes of destination. The findings of this study can provide the tourism industry in Bangladesh with critical insights for future disaster management and sustainable development of the tourism industry.

Job and residential location changes responding to floods and cyclones: an analysis based on a cross-nested logit model

With the increasing impacts of climate change, many people in Bangladesh are being forced to move their homes and/or change their jobs. Unfortunately, little is known about how people jointly decide on their jobs and residential location changes in association with the influence of climate change disasters. The main purpose of this paper is to examine how residents in coastal and inland areas may change their jobs and/or residential location under different scenarios of potential impacts of floods and cyclones by comparing socioeconomic and experiential factors. A stated preference survey was conducted in 14 coastal and inland areas of Bangladesh. As a result, 788 respondents provided 3152 valid samples (1948 from coastal areas and 1204 from inland areas). Analysis results based on a cross-nested logit model indicate that flood has no obvious impact on choices of inland people, and flood and cyclone have limited effects on people’s choices in coastal areas, except for cyclone intensity. Income is not significant in the decisions of the coastal people, but it does matter to the inland people. The inland people are more likely to depend on government help during disasters. However, the coastal people’s decisions are driven by different factors in a complicated way. The inland people prefer changing their jobs to changing their residential locations, but the coastal people are slightly more aggressive in deciding to change their residential location in response to flood. Structural differences of choice behaviors under flood and cyclone are also revealed. Finally, policy implications are discussed.

Life-Oriented Tourism Behavior Research

Tourism as an extension of people’s daily life is becoming prevalent in today’s society. However, understanding tourists is still a demanding and changeable task, and the preference structures and decision patterns of different tourists are complex. Research on tourism behavior can help address these issues. In recent decades, research on tourism behavior has attracted considerable attention and has become a cornerstone of tourism market strategy and action. Tourism is not a transient behavior, but is repeated over time and is interrelated with daily life. To understand tourists’ lifestyle and decision-making processes, long-term observations of tourism behavior are needed. A life-oriented approach cannot ignore tourism behavior because it is an important part of life. This chapter analyzes recent research on tourism behavior, summarizes the pertinent concepts, characteristics, determinants, and shortcomings in existing studies on tourism behavior, and suggests directions for future research.

Adaptation of Behavior to Overcome Natural Disasters

This chapter deals with how people adapt their lives to natural disasters, such as flood, cyclone, extreme weather events, earthquake, and sea level rise. With the changing global climate, the disasters would appear more frequently and seriously. However, it is still uncertain where the disasters will occur nearby personal daily activity areas, and how great the impacts on human life will be. Surprisingly, literature review suggests that relevant studies are very limited, especially in the context of developing countries. Targeting Bangladesh, one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate and the sixth most vulnerable to floods, this chapter describes three case studies on people’s adaptation behaviors under the impacts of different flooding and cyclone scenarios in future by focusing on intercity travel behavior, job and residential location choice behavior, and tourism behavior respectively. Various findings are derived, which are useful to help identify the barriers to the adoption of adaptation measures, the roles of different stakeholders in implementing adaptation measures, and the directions of adaptation measures in the future.

Tourist Behavior Analysis for Sustainable Tourism Policy

Tourists’ travel decisions usually involve a number of choices made over time and across space. Because tourists face many aspects of choices and must deal with spatial and temporal constraints, it is expected that there will be interdependences in their behavior. Accurate representation of such interdependences is essential for improving understanding of their behavior and consequently may provide insights into tourism marketing and policy decisions. This chapter investigates interdependences among several aspects of tourists’ travel decisions, aiming to provide behavioral foundations for the development of an integrated tourism model system. It introduces two studies concerning integrated tourist behavior modeling. The first study jointly analyzes tourists’ three interrelated choices by using a nested logit (NL) model. In the second study, tourist’s time-use behavior, involving multiple activities, is analyzed using a multiple discrete–continuous extreme value (MDCEV) model. Application analyses are conducted using data collected in Japan. The findings have important practical implications for both destination management and policy making.