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

time from major origin markets), competitive microenvironment, global macroenvironment, security and safety, and price competitiveness.6. Demand Conditions. This paper emphasizes the importance of demand conditions.The destination may be competitive to one group of tourists, but not to another. Theauthors suggest that it is domestic tourism that triggers the nature and structure of anation’s tourism industry. Once domestic demand is established, foreign demandstarts to develop. In addition, the paper provides some discussion as to the differencebetween pull and push factors that motivate tourists to travel. “Pull” factors can beregarded as destination attributes that fulfill visitor travel motives. “Push” factors areforces that arise from individuals and from individuals’ social context. “Push” factorsare real motives for people to determine a destination’s competitiveness and to maketheir decision to travel. Demand conditions are a reflection of push factors. Theseinclude tourist preferences, international awareness of destination, overall destinationimage and international awareness of the destination’s specific product offerings.7. Objective Performance Indicators of Destination Competitiveness. The purpose ofthese indicators is to measure the destination competitiveness. First of all,performance can be measured statistically by using visitor statistics (number ofvisitors and their expenditures). Secondly, contribution of domestic and foreigntourism to an economy can be estimated by looking at the contribution of tourism tovalue added, employment, and the productivity of tourism industry sectors. Thirdly, itis important to know the amount of investment in the tourism sector; also pricecompetitiveness indexes, the extent of government support, and financial incentivesfor tourism.8. Indicators of Economic Prosperity are aggregate level of employment, rate ofeconomic growth, and per capita income.Relevance to Our ResearchThis research attempts a very broad collection of factors that affect the relativecompetitiveness of destinations. They acknowledge the complexity of the dynamics oftourism attraction and attempt to provide a guide to begin to measure this process.Although this complexity goes beyond the scope of our project, there are severalelements of these models that will help guide our classification of attractions.Dwyer and Kim’s latest model allows for the interaction of different components, andGlobal Insight believes some indication of the complementarity of city attractions will beimportant to our classification. Additionally, Dwyer and Kim indicate the importance ofshopping as an important part of tourist attractors. Their emphasis on infrastructureattests to the importance of the ease with which tourists are able to access the attractionsthey want to visit.Urban Tourism Marketing LiteratureUrban Tourism Marketing Literature provides a discussion of marketing strategiesundertaken by urban authorities and tourism marketers. Essentially, the idea behindmarketing is to make a tourist model—which was discussed in the previous section—attract more tourists and generate more revenue to the local economy. “A destination thathas a tourism vision, shares this vision among all stakeholders, understands both its48