Modelling the choice of tourism destinations: a positioning analysis

• Autor(a) principal: Carneiro, Maria João Aibéo
• Data de Publicação: 2007
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/1841
• topic: Turismo; Indústria do turismo; Desenvolvimento do turismo; Destinos turísticos

The extensive economic impacts of tourism have been increasingly recognised worldwide. People engaged in tourism development and tourism promotion invest considerable effort and resources into attracting people to visit destinations. In recent decades, progress has been made into better understanding how potential tourists select a destination. However, little is known about how visitors compare destinations they consider visiting, and why they choose to visit one destination rather than others they have considered. The aim of this thesis is to improve understanding about the criteria used to compare the destinations people consider visiting. Literature pertinent to the positioning of tourism destinations and destination choice models is reviewed. To extend the contribution provided by others, a new model of destination choice is proposed and partially tested. The objective is to provide a model that incorporates some features relating to positioning which have been neglected in previous destination selection models. The new model explicitly incorporates positioning analysis into a model of how destinations are selected. This model extends the contributions of previous models by integrating determinants of the positioning of destinations disregarded in other models, as well as by empirically testing proposed interrelationships between determinants that have been previously neglected. The revised model also suggests that the influence of determinants of positioning may change across the process of selecting destinations.