Stephen L.J. Smith

Segmenting Canadian Culinary Tourists

Researchers in culinary tourism often implicitly treat visitors interested in culinary products as a relatively homogeneous market. Using data obtained from the Canadian Travel Activities and Motivations Study, three a priori segments are defined: visitors who participate only in food-related activities, those who participate only in wine- related activities, and those who participate in both. The food segment was the largest of the three, with nearly 25% of respondents fitting this category; wine was the smallest segment with less than 4%. Wine and food accounted for about 7%. The food segment had a higher proportion of females than the other segments, with lower average educational attainment and lower incomes. Wine-oriented visitors were more balanced between male and female, had average ages and educational attainment, and higher incomes. Those visitors involved in both sets of activities were predominantly male, older, had the highest educational levels, and much higher incomes. Trip motivations and activities also differed significantly among the three segments with the food and wine segment showing the greatest diversity of motivations and activities. In other words, there are distinct types of culinary tourists who seek distinct types of culinary experiences. Different methods of communications, and different packaging and product development strategies need to be employed to reach each of the segments identified here.

Residents’ attitudes to tourism: a longitudinal study of 140 articles from 1984 to 2010

This paper is a longitudinal study of 140 articles on residents’ attitudes to tourism published in Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Management, and Journal of Travel Research from 1984 to 2010. Content analysis was used to determine the nature of the articles and the research approaches used. Although most articles were atheoretical, over the survey period an increasing proportion of studies made use of a variety of theories drawn from other disciplines to investigate the topic. The majority of studies were quantitative in nature, while a few studies used qualitative and mixed-methods approaches. Based on the results, some implications for research design and possibilities for future research are discussed. The paper concludes that studies on the topic have evolved from being low on methodological sophistication and theoretical awareness to being high on both aspects. Research on this topic has reached a stage of active scholarship in theory development followed by empirical testing. The studys limitations are discussed, which readers should take into account when evaluating its findings.

A Test Of Plog's Allocentric/Psychocentric Model: Evidence From Seven Nations

This research note presents a test of Plogs model of tourism destination preferences. Data are reported for seven nations in terms of destinations preferred by allocentric, mid-centric, and psychocentric tourist types. The data reported fail to confirm an association between personality types and destination preferences.

Profiling Taiwanese Ecotourists Using a Self-definition Approach

Numerous studies have profiled ecotourists but these have been done mainly in the context of North American ecotourists. This study provides one of the few examinations of the rapidly developing Asian ecotourism market in the context of domestic visitation to Taiwans Taroko National Park. The study uses an innovative self-defined approach to defining an ecotourist. Findings include demographic results, benefits sought, travel motivation, and activities. Comparisons between Taiwanese and North American ecotourists are also made.

Service Attributes And Situational Effects On Customer Preferences For Restaurant Dining

This article presents a model of consumer choice behavior and illustrates the effective ness of the model through decisions made about a restaurant meal. Management and marketing implications are discussed.

Leisure, recreation and tourism

Abstract Recreation and leisure studies in North America offers a number of intriguing parallels with tourism. Both have diverse origins; are inherently interdisciplinary; and combine traditional atheoretical, descriptive, and applied research with innovative scholarship that is devoted to developing and testing concepts and theories. It is noted that both recreation/leisure and tourism must strive for academic legitimacy. The history of the field is briefly traced, with particular attention given to its dual origins and their convergence. Basic concepts and research perspectives are described, as well as the relationship of the field to tourism. Specific areas of understanding that can contribute to tourism are summarized.

Optimal Control of Markov Decision Processes With Linear Temporal Logic Constraints

In this paper, we develop a method to automatically generate a control policy for a dynamical system modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). The control specification is given as a Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formula over a set of propositions defined on the states of the MDP. Motivated by robotic applications requiring persistent tasks, such as environmental monitoring and data gathering, we synthesize a control policy that minimizes the expected cost between satisfying instances of a particular proposition over all policies that maximize the probability of satisfying the given LTL specification. Our approach is based on the definition of a novel optimization problem that extends the existing average cost per stage problem. We propose a sufficient condition for a policy to be optimal, and develop a dynamic programming algorithm that synthesizes a policy that is optimal for a set of LTL specifications.

Regional analysis of tourism resources

Abstract The scientific identification and analysis of tourism regions is an important task in tourism planning. Although some authors have developed and applied different methods for regionalization, the subject is still under-researched. This article describes a procedure for defining tourism regions on the basis of country-level resource patterns. Four basic structures are identified in these patterns: “urban tourism,” “outdoor recreation,” “cottaging/boating,” and “urban fringe tourism.” These four structures empirically give rise to six different types of counties. The spatial patterns of these county types reveal a complexity that is masked by the existing, simplified tourism regions defined by the provincial government. The article concludes by relating tourism resource patterns to two measures of the economic importance of tourism. Urban tourism resources appear to be the most significant determinant of total county tourism receipts, while cottaging/boating resources are the most important determinant of the relative local magnitude of tourism as an industry.

Restaurants and dining out: Geography of a tourism business

Abstract Restaurants and dining out are an important part of the tourism industry and are a major business in their own right. They also have characteristics that make a geographical analysis especially pertinent: They require movement through space, there are strong regional variations in patterns of restaurant development, and location is an important factor in the success of a restaurant. This paper examines two aspects of the geography of the restaurant industry in Canada: national patterns of restaurant development and the tendency to dine out, and local patterns of site selection. Basic patterns are described and possible processes influencing these patterns identified. Recommendations are given for the location of new restaurants of different types

Planning Paths for Package Delivery in Heterogeneous Multirobot Teams

This paper addresses the task scheduling and path planning problem for a team of cooperating vehicles performing autonomous deliveries in urban environments. The cooperating team comprises two vehicles with complementary capabilities, a truck restricted to travel along a street network, and a quadrotor micro-aerial vehicle of capacity one that can be deployed from the truck to perform deliveries. The problem is formulated as an optimal path planning problem on a graph and the goal is to find the shortest cooperative route enabling the quadrotor to deliver items at all requested locations. The problem is shown to be NP-hard. A solution is then proposed using a novel reduction to the Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem, for which well-established heuristic solvers exist. The heterogeneous delivery problem contains as a special case the problem of scheduling deliveries from multiple static warehouses. We propose two additional algorithms, based on enumeration and a reduction to the traveling salesman problem, for this special case. Simulation results compare the performance of the presented algorithms and demonstrate examples of delivery route computations over real urban street maps.