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

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I. Executive SummaryHighlightsThe recent decline in both tourist visits and tourism spending in Ontario has sparked aninterest in evaluating Ontario's tourist attractions base of its major centres, namelyToronto and Ottawa. This includes assessing the gaps of each city's product offeringrelative to other North American tourist centres. To help understand this issue, theOntario Ministry of Tourism and Recreation (the Ministry) in partnership with CanadianTourism Commission, Canadian Heritage, and Parks Canada commissioned GlobalInsight to develop an econometric study to quantify the relative importance of a range offactors that influence tourists’ decisions to visit a particular destination within NorthAmerica.The main objective of this study was to estimate the impact of building additionalattractions on increasing tourist visitations to selected North American cities and, inparticular, to Toronto and Ottawa. This study did not consider visitor spending or lengthof stay. The study objective was achieved by establishing a database of the attractionsoffered to tourists visiting the selected North American cities and the number of leisurevisitors to each city. Utilizing this database, Global Insight built a series of crosssectionaleconometric models to examine the deviation among leisure visitation amongthese cities. The estimated coefficients from these models provided an assessment of therelative importance of various attractions in explaining the number of tourist visitations.Global Insight's major findings include:• Popular entertainment attractions are the most consistent draw.• Attractions complement and supplement each other.• Rated attractions perform significantly better than non-rated attractions.• A number of smaller, mostly Canadian cities receive fewer visitors than theirattractions’ portfolio would warrant.• Cities have the most to gain by diversifying their attraction base.Study SummaryThe first step in Global Insight's approach was to conduct a literature review to becomefamiliar with the most recent research regarding the appropriate attractiveness indicatorsto be utilized, the schemes to quantify them for modelling purposes, and the type of datathat were used.An attractions matrix was developed to classify the attractions into four of the mostobvious categories that are known to draw tourists and are consistent across cities. Thepurpose of designing an attractions matrix was to include a wide range of attractions thatare generally believed to stimulate tourist visitations. Using this attraction matrix, theappropriate attractions data were collected for each city. The total tourist visitations andrelevant non-attractions data were also assembled.1
Global Insight selected a cross-sectional approach to econometric modelling. Thisapproach allowed Global Insight to use a multi-city modelling methodology to exploiteconomies of scale by pooling data across 50 cities and estimating one equation for eachstructural relationship. Finally, Global Insight developed five robust econometric modelswith unique characteristics.The assembled attractions database and five econometric models (via the estimatedcoefficients) provided a wealth of information concerning the importance of each type ofattraction in generating tourist visits to selected North American cities.However, these coefficients were estimated based on a sample of 50 cities and providedan average estimate across all cities in the sample. Therefore, additional analysis usingthe elasticity concept calculated the implied impacts on Toronto and Ottawa.RecommendationsThe results of our study suggest that Toronto and Ottawa would both gain the largestnumber of additional visitors by concentrating their future attractions portfoliodevelopment on the following types of quality attractions:• Three-star rated amusement parks.• Three-star and one-star shopping areas.• Three-star-specific structures (i.e. CN Tower or Sky Dome).• They would also benefit from the construction of one- and two-star-ratedattractions from a popular entertainment category (amusement and theme parks,and from casinos).Furthermore, this tourism strategy should also stress the following aspects:• Increasing marketing budgets in both cities. It was found that informationavailable to the traveller prior to departure, as well as the presentation of thisinformation, is important in determining the destination for many travellers.Furthermore, based on experience of several other Canadian cities, Toronto andOttawa could receive substantial returns from increasing their marketing budgets.• New attractions need to be added with careful consideration to the supportingtourist infrastructure needs, such as public transportation and hotels rooms, tomaximize tourists’ overall experience with the new attraction.• The high U.S. population density is a plus in providing visitors to U.S. cities. Thisis another argument for increasing the promotion to U.S. markets and adoptingschemes to encourage U.S. visitors to travel north. Joint air travel/hotel staypackages for U.S. visitors that feature incentives, such as reduced attractionadmission fees or food and beverage vouchers, could be utilized in this regard.• Complementarity or interaction of multiple sites at the destination is crucial. Bothcities should be careful to maintain a balance among a variety of attraction typeswhen adding new attractions.2
Page 2 and 3: Table of ContentsI. EXECUTIVE SUMMA
Page 6 and 7: Next StepsThis project has surfaced
Page 8 and 9: IV.coefficients from these models p
Page 10 and 11: series, simple autoregressive and
Page 12 and 13: Arts & Culture Museums Historymuseu
Page 14 and 15: The tourist visitations data was al
Page 16 and 17: Hotel Room Count and Hotel Property
Page 18 and 19: Table 9: Michelin’s RatingsRating
Page 20 and 21: value below one suggests that the s
Page 22 and 23: Table 13: Individual Attractions Th
Page 24 and 25: Table 16: Significant Results 14Equ
Page 26 and 27: The adjusted R 2 for this model is
Page 28 and 29: • On average across all cities, b
Page 30 and 31: Model 5C 17 : In Model 5C, the numb
Page 32 and 33: The model overpredicts the number o
Page 34 and 35: Attraction Elasticities for Ottawa
Page 36 and 37: Table 22: Marketing Budget Elastici
Page 38 and 39: VII.Technical AppendixA. Attraction
Page 40 and 41: • Metropolitan Opera House in New
Page 42 and 43: Model 3: Three-Star Quality-Rated A
Page 44 and 45: Model 5B: Three-Star Quality-Rated
Page 46 and 47: 3. The cognitive perspective involv
Page 48 and 49: also found that almost half of the
Page 50 and 51: Also, the model seems to completely
Page 52 and 53: strengths and its weaknesses, devel
Page 54 and 55:
Items from QuestionnaireTable 23: M
Page 56 and 57:
Tourism Demand/Econometric Modellin
Page 58 and 59:
Table 25: Types of Explanatory Vari
Page 60 and 61:
Results: Lim and McAleer found that
Page 62 and 63:
Richards, Greg. (2002). “Tourism
Page 64 and 65:
Figure 4: Overseas Visitors to U.S.
Page 66 and 67:
Figure 6: Cities Person-Trips Volum
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