An annual time use model for domestic vacation travel

Abstract

Vacation travel in the USA, which constitutes about 25% of all long-distance travel, has been increasing consistently over the past two decades and warrants careful attention in the context of regional and statewide transportation air quality planning and policy analysis, as well as tourism marketing and service provision strategies. This paper contributes to the vacation travel literature by examining how households decide what vacation travel activities to participate in on an annual basis, and to what extent, given the total annual vacation travel time that is available at their disposal. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive modeling exercise in the literature to undertake such a vacation travel time-use analysis to examine purpose-specific time investments. A mixed multiple discrete-continuous extreme value (MDCEV) model structure that is consistent with the notion of “optimal arousal” in vacation type time-use decisions is used in the analysis. The data for the empirical analysis is drawn from the 1995 American Travel Survey (ATS). The results show that most households participate in different types of domestic vacation travel over the course of a year, and spend significantly different amounts of time on each type of vacation travel, based on household demographics, economic characteristics, and residence characteristics.