Travel behavior on vacation: transport mode choice of tourists at destinations

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Travel behavior on vacation: transport mode choice of tourists at destinations

Bursa, Bartosz / Mailer, Markus / Axhausen, Kay W.

Highlights • A study on tourist mobility that employs revealed preference travel-activity data. • Precise computation of mode attributes (time, cost) extends existing approaches. • Company, trip purpose, destination knowledge and weather also influence mode choice. • Tourists are inelastic to changes in price, but react to changes in travel time. • Accounting for tourist on-site travel is essential for accurate policy design.

Abstract Tourist travel contributes greatly to transport problems in highly attractive tourist areas. Despite that, local travel behavior of visitors at the destination has hardly been investigated so far. To fill this gap, we used data from a bespoke travel-activity survey conducted in the Austrian Alps to develop models of transport mode choice of tourists during their vacation stays at the resorts. The outcomes reveal significant effects of, inter alia, travel time, travel cost, travel party composition, trip purpose, respondent’s level of fitness, their knowledge about long-distance travel to the destination and mobility options at the destination, and selected weather elements. Tourists are found to be very inelastic to changes in travel cost, whilst more responsive to changes in travel time. The paper delivers unique evidence that can advance transport policy design and thus contribute to more sustainable travel at tourist destinations.