Border-Area Tourism and International Attractions: Benefit Dimensions and Segments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This research identifies areas of economic, experiential and logistical enhancement that will lead to increased visits to and expenditures at international attractions by border-area tourists. Dimensions shown to be salient to these cross-border travellers' decisions include value (the combined consideration of price and quality issues), informational and experiential (relevant media exposure and the affective, service and variety elements of the travel experience), and practical considerations associated with the border crossing (traffic and customs enforcement). Two benefit segments emerge (value and experiential). Value appears to have ceiling effect when it comes to investments in value delivery for cross-border visitors. However, value-based strategies may be the most efficient route to attracting those of this large segment who are not yet satisfied with this aspect of cross-border travel. The Experiential segment, though smaller, is highly susceptible to improvements in communication, service, variety, and the affective aspects of the foreign-travel experience. INTRODUCTION The purpose of this paper is to explore the factors that will keep those on whom international tourist attractions rely for the greater share of their revenue coming back for more. Based on survey of consumers in the North American border region that is home to one of the world's top natural attractions - Niagara Falls - it attempts to identify areas of economic, experiential and logistical enhancement that will lead to increased visits to and expenditures at tourist venues. Whether such an effort is of value or merely foolhardy, given Wilkinson's (2009) assertion that the future of tourism is akin to predicting the future of 'mess,' we will leave to our readers to determine. Statistically and anecdotally, evidence of the challenges confronting tourism managers abounds. In the United States, the number of tourist arrivals declined 20 percent, or more than 10 million, in the early years following the 9/11 attack, and did not again reach the 2000 level of more than 51 million until 2007 (NationMaster.com). By 2009, tourist travel to the United States again down - 6.3 percent the prior year (ITA 2010). In neighboring Canada, tourist arrivals fell 15 percent between 2002 and 2008, showing declines each year except 2003 to 2004 (NationMaster.com). Even South Africa, which, with the early growing pains of the post-apartheid era behind it, had experienced modest to substantial growth in tourist arrivals most years in the first decade of this century (NationMaster.com), feeling the effect of the global economic downturn as this decade began. Town Routes Unlimited (CTRU) reported a reluctance on the part of hard hit consumers to travel distances (Weekend Post 2010). As consequence, the Garden Route, long hailed as the tourism mecca of the country, experienced dearth of international visitors and was not among the top performers . . . when it came to attracting international tourists last year. Such results are hardly unique to North America and South Africa. Does the fall-off of long-distance tourism need to spell financial catastrophe for attractions relying on international tourism revenues? A glimpse at where the bulk of those revenues come from, even in more prosperous economic times, suggests it may not. Xu, Yuan, Gomez and Fridgen (1997) compared shortdistance (within 250 miles or about 400 kilometers), medium-distance (251 to 500 miles or approximately 400 to 800 kilometers) and long-distance travelers (more than 500 miles or 800 kilometers) to attractions in the border state of Michigan in Midwestern United States. They found that frequent or repeat travelers are more likely to be those who reside within 500 mile radius travel than those who reside some distance the destination (p. 103). The South African experience appears to be similar; the CTRU indicated that 91% of visitors to the Garden Route and Kelin Karoo were domestic travelers, with 60% coming from within the Western Cape (Weekend Post 2010). …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".