Outbound Tourism Holiday Behavior of Spanish Residents: Choice of Destination

Abstract

This paper presents a destination choice model by Spanish outbound travelers. Using 2009 data from the survey conducted by the Institute of Tourism Studies on 4559 outbound trips from Spain, we estimate a multinomial logistic model of outbound tourism demand to all destinations around the World. Socio-demographic characteristics of individuals and relevant features of travels have been included as explanatory variables and the estimated model has proved they are statistically significant. Furthermore, we check for the model robustness and confirm that the average percentage of correct predictions supports the utility of the model.Although the countries with the greatest market shares are relatively similar (most of them are European countries), empirical results are very robust and clearly identify different profiles of travelers according to the selected destination. This is obviously a great advantage to address market segmentation and design marketing strategies and policy incentives for each segment.