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Abstract

Many tourism destinations aim at expanding their market share of high spending visitors by shifting from quantity to quality. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the introduction of social distancing requiring hotspots and mass destinations to reduce their capacity. This paper proposes a two-step approach for identifying top spending European countries over time, distinguishing between leisure and business travelers. The methodology employs the Country Product Dummy index with a hierarchical clusterization, enriched by a convergence analysis. This approach overcomes general shortcomings of descriptive statistics and cluster analyses directly applied to raw expenditure data. The outcomes of this analysis provide a detailed picture of the European travelers’ expenditure across time and geographical area. The identified top spending countries of leisure and business travelers can be targeted through ad-hoc marketing campaigns and specific packages for privileging quality tourism and planning economic recovery in the post-COVID-19 reopening phase, while shifting away from mass tourism.

Keywords

travelers’ expenditure country product dummy index quality tourism clustering destination profitability

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From Quantity to Quality: Capturing Higher Spending Markets through a Segmentation of Travelers’ Expenditure

Abstract

Keywords

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References

Supplementary Material