Factors Affecting Time Spent Visiting Heritage City Areas

Abstract

Urban tourism is growing fast, and in many cities visitor influx tends to concentrate in historic urban centers. When there are large numbers of visitors, deepening the knowledge on visitor time consumption is critical to better managing their impact on the city, and creating a sustainable city tourism destination. This has generated an increasing interest in the micro-spatial and temporal dimensions of tourist behavior in city tourism research and planning. This article focuses on modelling the factors affecting the duration of visits to each heritage attraction, and to the whole visit to the heritage city. This study adds to previous research in several ways: it uses survival models; distinguishes between attractions with and without an entrance fee; and tests how visitor type affects time behavior, for example, day visitor versus tourists, peak season versus off-peak season, informed visitors versus non-informed visitors, highly motivated visitors versus visitors with low motivation. Results show that there is significant heterogeneity in time consumption. This is generated by factors such as traveling with children, cultural proximity, rating of the attraction, and price and time constraints. Some evidence is also found, which suggests first-time visitor and informed visitors have an impact on time consumption

This article constitutes an output from the research projects in grants CSO2011-26634 and CSO2015-70633-P, from the Spanish Government