Tourism Demand

Most previous empirical studies used tourist arrivals, departures, tourism receipts, and expenditures as dependent variables of their analysis. Reviews of the literature on tourism demand by Crouch (1994); Witt and Witt (1995); Lim (1997, 1999) and Li, Song and Witt (2005) suggest a substantial agreement regarding both tourism demand measures and the variables that are important in explaining international tourism flows. The study is supported by Witt and Witt (1995), who found that about 20% percent of tourism demand models used these variables. Other possible variables are tourist expenditure (32%), average length of stay (6%) and number of nights (3%). Accordingly, the estimated demand function for tourism underlines the importance of selected variables in tourism demand studies.

 
         

Dependent Variables

                 Tourism demand can be measured in terms of the number of tourist arrival, tourism expenditure, average length of stay, and other variables. The quantity of tourism demand was most frequently measured in terms of arrival or departure numbers: as this was often the only type of demand data available (Crouch, 1994). However, tourist arrivals have been used as a dependent variable in most studies on tourism demand. This is supported by Witt and Witt (1995), who found that about 75 out of 118 studies on the demand for tourism used total tourist arrivals as a proxy for demand. Similarly, Li (2004) found that 37 out of 45 articles published chose tourist arrivals as the dependent variable. Tourism board (2008) found that 45 percent of the tourism demands models had used tourist arrivals.