Expenditure and stay behaviour of nature based visitors: the case of Costa Rica

Abstract

Tourism industry shows an important development in Central America in recent years, with annual growth of tourist´s arrivals being around 7% between 1995-2013, and the volume of visitors increasing from 2.6 to 7.9 million. Moreover, according to UNWTO prospects, 14 million people are expected to arrive in 2020 to the region, and 22 million in 2030 (UNWTO, 2014). Nature-based tourism is highly extended in this area. Green forest and wildlife richness act as a principal resource attracting worldwide visitors to the region, which has become one of the main natural reserves of the biosphere in the planet. In this study we get deeper understanding of the particularities of visitors coming to a nature-based tourist destination. Building on a survey of more than 14,000 questionnaires for years 2009-2011, we investigate the behaviour of tourists coming to a salient country of the region, Costa Rica. With this aim, we estimate two equations in order to understand the main factors explaining expenditure and stay patterns of international tourists arriving to the country. In particular, we test for the role played by time and budget restrictions, socio-economic features of visitors, destination characteristics, and previous knowledge of the country. In doing so, we are able to compute the cross-elasticity emerging between expenditure and stay duration. All these findings help us to improve the knowledge on visitor´s behaviour arriving to a nature-based tourist place, obtaining interesting conclusions for destination management in a sustainable basis for this type of locations. The research is divided into four chapters. After this brief introduction, the second section provides a descriptive analysis of international tourism in Costa Rica. The third section includes the econometric analysis of the daily expenditure and stay duration of tourists, discussing the main findings of the model. Finally, the fourth section concludes.