Activity preferences of Asian international and domestic American university students: An alternate basis for segmentation

Abstract

Though the student market constitutes a significant portion of revenues in the travel industry, it has received little attention in tourism research. The primary purpose of this paper is to offer an alternate approach to segmentation and to subdivide the student market on the basis of travel activity preferences of Asian and domestic university students. When a division based on ethnicity is adopted, the study findings suggest that the travel activity preferences of Asian and domestic college students are surprisingly similar. Subdividing this market by means of a factor-cluster segmentation methodology, however, yielded two cluster groups that were significantly differentiated by variables such as gender, age, source of income, length of stay, marital status and travel group size. The ability to segment this market in terms of descriptors other than ethnicity allows marketers to focus their efforts differently in their attempts to target these groups.