Back The culture and development of each country determine European tourists’ information sources when it comes to travelling

The culture and development of each country determine European tourists’ information sources when it comes to travelling

The research, published in Journal of Travel Research, has been carried out by professors Michael Greenacre (UPF and Barcelona GSE) and Tor Korneliussen (University of North Norway). The article won a prize for best paper in 2017, awarded by the Economic Research Fund Foundation.

19.06.2018

 

The ability to attract tourists is crucial to the success of companies in the sector. There is much interest in finding out which are the sources of information people use when it comes to choosing a destination, and more so given that in Europe, tourism is a massive industry that has turned its citizens into a regular travellers.

International segmentation and a strategy designed to attract tourists should include an identification of the sources of information used by this market. The promotion of destinations across countries is a fundamental task for the success of the tourist industry, and it is not always easy to achieve.

Research carried out by Michael Greenacre, a researcher at UPF’s Department of Economics and Business and of the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, in conjunction with Tor Korneliussen, a professor at the Northern University of Norway, investigates European tourist patterns and identifies what types of sources of information people use when planning their trips and holidays.

The research, entitled “Information Sources Used by European Tourists: A Cross-National Study”, was published in the Journal of Travel Research, and won the Norwegian Economic Research Fund Foundation prize for best paper in 2017.

Professor Korneliussen collected the prize on behalf of the two authors during the awards ceremony, which took place on 28 May in Norway. Michael Greenacre describes the study as “a very fruitful collaboration between a marketing expert and a statistician”.

According to the authors, their results are “highly relevant from a descriptive point of view, but also from the point of view of the implementation of management policies, as they would allow adapting the strategies of tourism marketing to each market or to each country, rendering advertising and promotion more effective and efficient”.

The representative sample used is part of the Eurobarometer on attitudes of Europeans towards tourism

The authors have found six segments of behaviour with regard to the use of information made by tourists, with similar patterns within each group, which are closely related to the specific country, its economic development and its national culture.

The study was carried out by aggregating data from 27 European countries, which has allowed identifying systematic differences in the sources of information that exist in Europe and in the way in which the potential travellers find their information when planning their trips or holidays.

The representative sample used is part of the Eurobarometer, with specific data on the source of information for each country. The survey asked respondents to choose the source of the most important information that is taken into account when planning their trip: personal experience, recommendations, guides, brochures, internet travel agencies or media.

Grouping of European countries into six homogeneous segments

Figure 1. Correspondence analysis in the use of information sources in respect of the various national cultures

One novelty of this study is that it is based on a statistical technique that is used to group the countries within the dimensions of the preferred sources of information, called “correspondence analysis”.

The authors defined two dimensions: first, commercial versus non-commercial sources of information (e.g., travel agencies and brochures versus personal experiences and recommendations); and secondly, in the commercial category, a differentiation between travel agencies and, on the other hand, Internet, brochures and guides.

Depending on how the different countries are located in these two dimensions, they are placed in four quadrants, which allow allocating the countries to six different groups (six well defined segments of behaviour): two segments in northern Europe, one area in the middle, one in the south of Europe, and two in the east. Each of these groups includes very similar countries: in fact, segmentation coincides considerably with the geographical location of the countries and their cultural environment, despite some occasional exceptions (Figure 1).

There is a clear difference between eastern and western countries. For example, group 6 (France, Germany, Belgium) tends to use more commercial information, while group 1 (Hungary, Bulgaria, Lithuania) uses it less. Also, there is a clear division between the countries in the north and in the south: group 4 (Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands) seeks information far more through personal sources than Italy and Spain (group 5).

Relation with per capita GDP and access to Internet

The authors relate these differences with the specific characteristics of each country, such as per capita GDP and access to Internet: countries with a higher per capita GDP seem to use more non-personal sources, which can be explained by their higher incomes and their people’s ability to choose places further afield as a holiday destination. Having greater access to the Internet may also encourage individuals to seek information outside the commercial dimension.

The authors, despite the potential implementation of this research on cultural policies, suggest that a new segmentation of the different “cultures” existing within each country, on a regional scale, could enrich the study and allow even more detailed results on the behaviour of Europeans in gathering information for their travel plans.

Reference work: Tor Korneliussen, Michael Greenacre (January 2017). “Information Sources Used by European Tourists: A Cross-National Study”. Journal of Travel Research

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