Factors Influencing Visitor's Choices of Urban Destinations in North ...

explain city visitations. Consequently, Global Insight focused on a series of models thatemploy several attraction count methodologies. It was gratifying that all three measuresof attraction count yielded generally consistent results.Number of AttractionsThe first type of attraction count was a simple measure of the number of attractions:Visitors city = F (# of Attractions city ) (1)This specification postulates a direct relationship between attractions and the number ofvisits. As the number of tourist attractions increases, the number of visits will alsoincrease. This formula was used to estimate an individual relationship between touristvisits and each attraction category, sub-category, and types of attractions using theattractions matrix.Normalized AttractionsThe second type of attraction count normalized the attraction count by city population inorder to reduce the influence of a city’s size or population in determining visitor counts:Visitors city = F (# of Attractions city / Population city ) (2)The count of attractions is often affected by the population size of the MSA or CMA. Forexample, the total count of attractions in New York is close to 300 and the populationbase is about 9.5 million, while the attractions count in Edmonton is 60 with thepopulation size close to 1 million.To correct for the population bias, the first equation was normalized by the populationsize. In the new equation, there is a direct relationship between the attractions count percapita and the number of visits. Therefore, as the number of attractions per capitaincreases, the number of visits will also increase.Normalized Share of AttractionsThe third type of attraction count measures shares of both visitors and normalizedattractions:Visitors city / Visitors NA = F ( # of Attractions city / # of Attractions NA ) (3)(Population city / Population NA )This formula is a location quotient that measures the percentage of a total attraction countin a particular city compared to the North American (NA) total count of attractionsdivided by the percentage of total population in this city compared to the total NorthAmerican population. It is important to note that the left-hand side of this equation isslightly different from two previous notations. This time the left-hand side measures thenumber of visits to a particular city compared to the total number of visits to NorthAmerica.This measure is a ratio. If the value of this ratio is greater than one, this shows that aparticular city has a greater share of attractions than the North American average, while a16