Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Therefore investigating these evaluation criteria is the key to understanding tourists'
preferences and their choice behaviour. There are three important questions that need to be
answered regarding the evaluation criteria used during tourists' decision-making:
1
which are the attributes/factors used as evaluation criteria by tourists;
2
how important are each of these attributes in tourists' decision-making; and
3
how are these attributes manipulated by tourists to evaluate alternatives.
This chapter addresses these key questions as a framework in which to discuss and evaluate
the research methods that have been or might be used to understand tourists' preferences. The
chapter concludes by arguing that combined techniques and emerging methods offer good
prospects to future research to understand how tourists make destination choice decisions in
different market contexts.
Which attributes/factors are selected as evaluation criteria by tourists?
The simplest way to fi nd out which attributes or factors are important for tourists is to ask them
straightforwardly either in the form of questionnaire or interviews. In previous questionnaire
based studies, researchers have tended to generate a list of possible attributes that are deemed to
be important to tourists such as price, safety or destination weather etc. and then ask respondents
to do a Likert-type scale or rating task for each attribute regarding their importance (e.g. Haahti
1986; Um and Crompton 1990; Go and Zhang 1997). For example, Um and Crompton (1990)
used a three-point scale questionnaire to classify 20 different attributes into perceived inhibitors,
neither perceived inhibitors nor perceived facilitators, or perceived facilitators. They then used a
fi ve-point scale to assess the relative strength of each attribute as a facilitator or inhibitor. Using
this method, based on the positive or negative role of each attribute, the attitudes of tourists
toward each destination can be estimated. In addition, if there are too many relevant attributes
which are found to be important during the decision-making, a factor analysis can be conducted
to reduce the number of attributes into a fewer dimensions/factors. Additionally, the attributes
should be in a form of at least ordinal data, and thus the reliability of each dimension is indicated
by Cronbach's alpha which is a coeffi cient of internal consistency. The study conducted by Beerli
and Martin (2004) is an example using factor analysis to classify the attributes that form a positive
destination image as well to identify the motivations behind destination selection.
In qualitative interview approaches, open-ended questions such as 'what attributes do you
consider when you choose a tourism destination?' are frequently used and the qualitative data
provided can be analyzed using content analysis so that frequently used phrases and words can be
coded and generalized as common attributes that are considered important (see Klenosky 2002).
As these two methods only ask for tourists' opinions toward each attribute without compari-
sons and the survey task or interview questions are easily understandable, the respondents only
need to use simple judgements to provide answers. Therefore, the response rate should be higher
than with more complicated methods containing complex tasks. Normally, for a new market or
an unfamiliar market whose preferences are still unknown, qualitative interviews or simple ques-
tionnaires with further data analysis are very useful to explore the relevant attributes concerned
and how they are used as criteria in tourists' decision-making. However, since respondents don't
need to compare different attributes directly and qualitative interview methods cannot provide
generalizable descriptions, the relative importance values of each attribute compared to each
other cannot be obtained and it is impossible to estimate how much effect on the decision-
making would be generated if the selected attributes change in importance. In order to know
