Modeling travel decisions: Urban exploration, cultural immersion, or both?

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the characteristics of the choice between cities and culture (or aspects of both) in selecting certain travel destinations. The data consist of 28,700 individuals in 32 European countries. Bivariate probit model estimates show that those with moderately and skilled occupations, students, pensioners, women, people living in cities and regions with a high gross domestic product per capita have a higher joint probability of undertaking city and cultural trips. Furthermore, there are large differences in decisions to take a combined city and cultural trip across the countries of residence surveyed, with small western European countries exhibiting the highest probability.

KEYWORDS:

• Travel decision
• city trip
• cultural trip
• cross-country differences
• Eurobarometer
• bivariate probit model

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Jessica Sloan-Leitner and Tyler Schaffner for carefully proofreading this text. We would also like to thank Karol Jan Borowiecki, John O’Hagan, Eva Hagsten, Sara Mitchell, Annie Tubadji, and the participants of the 7^th European Workshop on Applied Cultural Economics (EWACE) in Vienna, Austria, and the eighth annual Consumer Behaviour in Tourism Symposium (CBTS) 2015 in Munich, Germany, for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.