Assessing visitor satisfaction with tourism rejuvenation policies: the case of Rimini, Italy

Abstract

This paper assesses the appeal of potential interventions on the tourism offer of Rimini, a popular Italian seaside holiday destination, by means of a choice modelling analysis. Tourism can be viewed as a composite good, its overall utility depending on the arrangement of the component characteristics. The discrete choice experiments here incorporate as attributes a number of possible changes to current tourist activities (the subject of public debate), including them in hypothetical alternative holiday packages. The conditional logit analysis indicates that tourists show lesser preference for interventions aimed at protecting the environmental integrity of the beach and greater preference for those, such as the creation of a pedestrianised seafront with late-night opening of amenities and facilities, that are likely to diminish the role of the traditional sea, sun and sand component of the overall holiday experience.

Keywords:

• tourism demand
• stated preferences
• urban planning
• decision making
• choice experiments

Acknowledgements

This research has benefited from funding by the PRIN (National Interest Programme Research) project ‘Sustainable local development and tourism’. The authors wish to thank Guido Candela, Massimiliano Castellani, Paolo Figini, Maurizio Mussoni, Tiziana Troia, and all participants in the above-mentioned PRIN project. Useful insights came from participants at the Second International Conference on Tourism Economics, Palma de Mallorca, 18–20 May 2006; XVIII SIEP conference, Pavia 14–15 September 2006; Economics of Tourism Workshop, Rimini 20 April 2007.

Notes

1. In a related paper, Figini et al. (2007) consider resident preferences and social improving policies.

2. For a recent application, see Crouch et al. (2007).

3. This mainly holds for the summer, when its extensive beaches and cheap rates attract tourists. Every year, from May to September, Rimini hosts an average 1.9 million tourists in terms of arrivals, with over 12.7 million overnight stays (Provincia di Rimini 2007).

4. In the last decade, Rimini has developed a strategy of product differentiation by entering the fair and business tourism market, trying to exploit its facilities all year round.

5. The reduction is larger in Rimini than in Italy. Namely, from July 1990 to July 2004, the average length of stay in Rimini showed a 19.6% decrease (moving from 8.66 to 6.96 days), whilst the decrease in Italy has been 10.1% (from 7.05 to 6.34 days). (Provincia di Rimini 2006, 2007)

6. Eighty-three per cent of tourists in Rimini (52% of foreign and 91% of Italian tourists) organise their own holidays, without going through tour operators or travel agencies (Scorcu and Vici 2006). The destination offers a wide array of services to be purchased either by private visitors or tour operators, leaving ample room for product differentiation strategies.

7. More precisely, the experienced tourists are those who recently spent their summer holidays in Rimini. Therefore, the sample is representative of the typical Rimini tourist, but not of potential new categories of tourists to that destination.

8. If respondents view the process as entirely hypothetical or useless, then their responses will not be meaningful in any economic sense (Carson 2000).

9. The aim of these questions was to determine the size of different relevant market tourism segments typically considered to visit this destination.

10. A ‘status quo’ alternative is not explicitly considered, although it is implicitly defined (and can be identified) in terms of a specific set of attribute levels provided in the questionnaire.

11. A check was made to see whether any respondents always selected the option on the left or on the right as their answers to all choice questions. It was found that one individual out of 605 picked the Holiday A option in all choice questions, whereas another two respondents always chose the Holiday B alternative.

12. Violations of the IIA assumption may arise when some alternatives are qualitatively similar to others or there are heterogeneous preferences among respondents. If IIA is violated, alternative choice models should be used, such as the nested logit model, the random-coefficient logit model or the multinomial probit model. A textbook description of these methods is given by Train (2003).

13. This estimate typically relies on the assumption that the marginal utility of income is constant over the range of implicit income changes implied by the policy. This assumption is reasonable if the cost of a choice alternative represents a small amount with respect to individual income.

14. Inclusion of interactions is also useful for addressing problems related to violations of the IIA hypothesis (Birol and Cox 2007).

15. The typical tourist of Rimini creates his own holiday package, and finds it is convenient to ‘lump’ board and lodging. Product standardisation and habit formation might explain this characteristic of Rimini. Indeed, a large percentage (81.4%) of loyal tourists regularly spend their holidays in Rimini (Orsingher 2004). Moreover, 70.9% of tourists habitually repeatedly use the same accommodation and facility structures.

16. For a more detailed analysis see Scorcu and Vici (2006).

17. The whole sample consists of 605 interviews. Given that each interviewee was required to make eight choices between two alternatives, the number of observations reported in the paper is equal to the number of interviews (605) multiplied by the number of alternatives submitted to each individual (16) = 9680.

18. A possible explanation for the latter result is that respondents, who are tourists who used to stay in Rimini for only a few days in summer, attach some utility to the fact that the beach could have a different setting when quite likely they could not be there. It can be argued that this different evaluation between the temporary impact and the permanent impact could be due to the presence of an altruistic utility component, or a slight sensitivity to environmental issues in general.

19. Cuccia and Cellini study tourists' preferences of Sicily, Italy, hosting different tourisms. Similar to Rimini, the leisure seaside tourism is the largest segment, whereas the cultural tourism is secondary. Their results are consistent with other previous research, which suggests that the heritage is not a key factor in the evaluation of different tourism offers, even for tourists interviewed during the visit of cultural sites (Cellini et al. 2004).

20. Two considerations should be recalled in calculating implicit prices: first, discrete level variations (and not marginal) are being dealt with. Second, these estimates are based on the assumption that the marginal utility of income is constant, an assumption that is only reliable when small level changes are considered (involving a minor proportion of total personal income).

21. These prices are per person, inclusive of taxes and service (Provincia di Rimini 2006).

22. The obvious reference for this type of problem is the seminal article by Butler (1980).