Visitor classification, vehicle breakdowns, and the provision of transport for tourism

Abstract

For a firm that provides transport to tourists/visitors and operates in a probabilistic environment, the twin issues of visitor classification and vehicle breakdowns have received scant attention in the extant literature. Therefore, we conduct a stochastic analysis of these two issues in this paper. We first describe a general model that accounts for the common features of sightseeing trips to city attractions and to locations such as lakes and parks. Second, for a given time interval, we provide a way of classifying the randomly arriving tourists and hence we shed light on the demand for our firm's offered tours. Finally, for the above time interval, we ascertain the mean and the variance of the number of vehicles that are not in service due to breakdowns and thus we shed light on the ability of our firm to supply transport to tourists for the various tours being offered.