Differentiation between everyday travel and tourism related travel

Abstract

Besides the differentiation between everyday and long‐distance travel based on a distance criterion, another distinction of travel can be made based on the definition of tourism. The World Tourism Organization assigns the movement of people outside their usual environment as tourism. According to this, travel within a person’s usual environment is part of everyday life and travel outside the usual environment corresponds to tourism‐related travel. Leaving the usual environment depends on the duration of a visit, the purpose and frequency of a visit and the distance from the usual place of residence. However, there is no general method or fixed framework for determining the usual environment and for applying it to data from travel surveys. In this paper, longitudinal travel behaviour data from the German Mobility Panel (MOP) is used to develop a heuristic to distinguish between everyday and tourism related travel. We approach the usual environment by considering activities and trips that are undertaken on a routine basis. We develop a step‐by‐step method that examines travel behaviour of individuals over a period of three weeks. Depending on the reported trips and activities, individual thresholds are calculated to describe the usual environment. Applying the method and the selected thresholds, we identify 9.57% of all reported trips taking place outside the usual environment and thus being tourism related trips. These trips account for 33.44% of the distances travelled in our data set. The results demonstrate a relevant share of tourism related travel embedded in everyday life and captured in everyday travel survey data.