Exploring the relationship between the length of stay and various determinants at one of the best European destinations

Abstract

Studies scrutinizing the tangible and intangible factors regarding the length of stay (LOS) in a destination are rare. The emotional factors have not always been integrated into this analysis. We have contributed to fill this gap in the literature considering the degree of happiness with the tourist destination. We used a sample of 1253 tourists and three regression models were estimated (OLS regression model, a Weibull survival model and a zero-truncated negative binomial) to study the LOS. We verified that the emotional factor related with happiness affects the LOS. Furthermore, regarding the managerial/practical implications it is important to highlight that the tourists who intend to visit the city have gastronomic and wine experiences, and, through their contact with the cultural heritage of the city, they will stay for a longer period of time. In addition to economic factors, as expenditures, there are also emotional and experiential aspects that influence LOS and these have to be included in the communication of a tourist destination. The attributes of a destination are not enough to influence the LOS. The destination must also be a set of experiences that will increase the happiness of the tourist with the destination.

Gastronomic experiences on tourists’ life satisfaction and happiness: The case of Porto

“…We concluded that a good gastronomic experience contributed to the satisfaction of tourists, and consequently, to increase their levels of happiness. We also know that emotional factors related with happiness affect the length of stay (LOS) in a destination (Vieira et al, 2021), and consequently there will be a positive impact in economic terms. These types of factors must be included in the analysis of the attractiveness of a tourist destination in addition to other attributes, namely heritage richness, culture, climate, prices, among others.…”

Identifying structural asymmetries by jointly estimating tourism expenditure intensity and extensity

“…Others, such as Perez and Sampol (2000), Wang et al (2006), Apostolakis and Jaffry (2009), Marrocu et al (2015), and Serra et al (2015) use daily personal expenditure, thereby acknowledging that daily spending and length of stay are two different decisions, albeit interrelated. This, in turn, gives rise to the analysis of length of stay independently, such as the works of De Menezes et al (2008), Barros and Machado (2010), Thrane and Farstad (2012b), Montaño et al (2019), Vieira et al (2021), and Atsız et al (2022). Whether modeling daily spending or length of stay, literature repeatedly reports measures of tourists’ socioeconomic characteristics, trip-specific choices, and psychological attributes as valid exogenous determinants of both decisions, thereby lending collective support to reduced-form modeling of both decisions as one construct in the form of total expenditure, without disentangling potential asymmetries in the two processes.…”

“…Length of stay, among the most scrutinized trip-specific determinants of expenditure, is frequently found to be endogenously determined by the same family of antecedents that determine spending Vieira et al, 2021;and Jackman and Naitram, 2023), leading to concerns over the consistency and unbiasedness of coefficients estimated without regard to the potential endogeneity of this important decision. Accordingly, literature has taken potential endogeneity of length of stay into consideration via IV regression as in Thrane (2015) or by means of structural equation modeling as in the case of Seiler et al (2003), Vetitnev (2015) and Štefko et al (2022).…”

“…Therefore, the determination of the expenditure decision has been widely investigated over the past four decades, where literature acknowledges tourists’ socioeconomic characteristics, trip-specific choices, and psychological attributes as viable proxies for their willingness and ability to pay (Mortazavi and Lundberg, 2020), and therefore, as relevant predictors that exogenously determine subsequent tourism expenditure levels, see Marcussen (2011), Brida and Scuderi (2013) and Mehran and Olya (2019). Length of stay, among the most scrutinized trip-specific determinants of expenditure, is frequently found to be endogenously determined by the same family of antecedents that determine spending (Alegre et al, 2011a; Gómez-Déniz and Pérez-Rodríguez, 2019a; Jackman and Naitram, 2023; Vieira et al, 2021), leading to concerns over the consistency and unbiasedness of coefficients estimated without regard to the potential endogeneity of this important decision. Accordingly, literature has taken potential endogeneity of length of stay into consideration via IV regression as in Thrane (2015) or by means of structural equation modeling as in the case of Seiler et al (2003), Vetitnev (2015), and Štefko et al (2022).…”

Profiles and factors influencing spending of wine tourists in Mendoza

“…Sellers and Nicolau (2021) proposed a dependency model based on prospective theory, in which the two basic principles of this theory, aversion to loss and decreasing sensitivity, are introduced to study the effect of visitor satisfaction on a critical result and the expense of the visitors in the winery. Vieira et al (2021) studied the relationship between length of stay and the combination of tangible and intangible aspects of the tourist experience in the analysis of their influence on LOS. Cho et al (2017) identified underlying dimensions that represented limitations for visiting wine regions and segmented the wine tourism consumer into five mutually exclusive cluster segments.…”