Travel Demand Function of Korean Tourists to Kyushu Region, Japan

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show that we can accurately forecast the recent drastic increases of Korean tourists to Fukuoka and their sharp drops after 2008 based on the travel demand function estimated by the deliberate use of micro-data obtained from the survey of inbound behaviors of Korean tourists conducted in 2000. Through showing this, we have demonstrated a way to solve the two inherent problems our questionnaire survey has; that is, one is the difficulty to get income data and the other the time limitation to perform detailed stated preference questions. To avoid detailed stated preference questions, we conceptualize respondents’ responses to the price changes of each of two travel modes as the changes of demand for the composite travel service composed of sea line and air flight. Based on this conceptualization, we have estimated a travel demand function for the composite travel service from Busan and Fukuoka. To enable us to estimate the travel demand function without income data, we made ratios to cancel out the income term in the travel demand function. The estimated result clearly shows that we could have predicted the recent surges and drops of Korean tourists to Fukuoka almost accurately at the time of 2000.