Promoting Sportfishing Development in Puerto Rico: Travel Agents' Perceptions of the Caribbean

Abstract

Tourist development often depends on the development of specific tourist activities (e.g., sportfishing), combined with new and creative approaches to promoting areas as tourist destinations. Travel agents occupy crucial positions in this process, acting as information brokers between tourists and tourist destinations. Their perceptions of tourist destinations influence their promotion behaviors. Methods that model perceptions using judged similarity and belief-frame comparison data, such as multidimensional scaling, optimal scaling and clustering analysis, are particularly useful in gaining information about how travel agents think about tourist destinations. Such methods may also facilitate attempts to promote one destination over another. We present these methods in this article, illustrating how they were applied to the promotion of sportfishing in Puerto Rico as one portion of an overall effort of fisheries development in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.