Dynamic Analysis of Japanese Tourists’ Three Stage Choices

Abstract

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.