Market segmentation based on time use: an empirical analysis in the historic city of Toledo, Spain

Abstract

There are two major scarce resources for visitors: time and money. However, literature on tourism has paid less attention to the former than to the latter. The objective of this paper is, therefore, to evaluate the effectiveness and profitability of time use in a destination as a segmentation criterion in tourism. The empirical analysis took place in the historic city of Toledo (Spain), and was based on information obtained from 799 day-trippers and tourists. The results obtained reveal the existence of four segments as regards day-trippers and another four as regards tourists. What is more, there are significant differences in the spending and future intentions of the clusters of day-trippers and tourists. All of these findings have led us to conclude that the segmentation criterion proposed will be of great use when determining which groups of visitors the destination most/least needs to attract. The empirical evidence obtained also provides practical orientation as to how to improve activity and service offers.

Keywords:

• segmentation
• time use
• activity
• visitors
• latent class cluster analysis

Acknowledgement

This article is a direct output of the author's PhD thesis which was supervised by Arturo Molina. The author would like to thank Arturo Molina for his constructive comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript.