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

The model overpredicts the number of visits to cities that are primarily smaller in termsof population size. As well, in seven out of the nine cases, the cities were Canadian. Inconsidering these results, Global Insight developed an additional hypothesis to explainthis behaviour. Most of these cities are relatively isolated from the major populationbases, and this could be a significant barrier to attracting more tourists. Model 5 does notcapture this factor.The addition of a population density variable to Model 5 results in Model 5B. This newmodel has a higher adjusted R 2 and greatly (although not entirely) improves the residualpattern—only three cities have non-random residuals. (Please see Table 18 and Figure 2)The population density variable measures the number of people per square kilometre inthe United States and Canada. For the U.S. cities this value was 29.4 residents per squarekilometre, and for the Canadian cities this number was only 3.1. In Model 5B, only threeout of ten North American cities suffer from extreme overprediction, and only one ofthese is Canadian.Table 18: Comparison of Models 5 and 5BType of AttractionType of SecondAttraction andAttractionNon-AttractionVariablesAdj.Amusement Parks (Q3)Specific Structures (Q3)Shopping Areas (Q3) &Room Count0.88Amusement Parks (Q3)Specific Structures (Q3)Shopping Areas (Q3)Room Count & Pop.Density0.90Source: Global Insight, Inc.R 2Figure 2: Residuals as a Percentage of Total Visits in Model 5B75%50%25%TorontoOttawa% of Total Visits0%0 10 20 30 40 50-25%-50%-75%-100%VancouverDetroitFort Lauderale-125%-150%City Ranking (in terms of Number of Visits)1-highest and 50-lowest in terms of # of visitsSource: Global Insight, Inc.29