Virtual Geography Convention 2013: Factors affecting visitors travel distance: a comparison of foreign event visitors and regular visitors in Estonia

Welcome to the Virtual Geography Convention 2013!  If you have a presentation or blog post you wished published please contact me at catholicgauze [at] gmail [dot] com! 

Kati Nibe is presenting on tourist flows throughout Estonia by nationality at the Association of American Geographers conference in Los Angeles.  Nibe is using mobile phone data as the primary research tool.  Nibe has a map (Estonian/Translated English) which documents the gathered data.

The abstract is below:

"The aim of this study is to get new knowledge about event tourism. My research objective is to study the effect of distance decay in event visitor's space-time behaviour. The factors influencing visitors´ travel behaviour may be socio-demographical, motivational or connected to some other type of characteristics. Several factors like visitors´ motivation, preferences and aims or destinations´ attractiveness have been studied before for event tourism (Cliquet 2007; Baumann et al 2009), but connections between event visitors´ space-time mobility have had very little attention by scientists. In this study, we analyse the characteristics connected to a trip using passive mobile positioning data generated from the Call Detail Record of roaming clients in Estonia (Ahas et al 2008; Tiru et al 2010). Foreign event visitors were compared with regular visitors in the period from 1 January 2006 to 1 January 2009 using logistical regression. The results showed that event visitors and regular visitors have different mobility patterns. Regular visitors had shorter length of stay in Estonia with the average of 2.1 days, while event visitors stayed in the destination longer with the average of 3.2 days. Event visitors from farer countries came to Estonia rather in winter than in summer, but regular visitors had revised preferences. In addition some similarities between these two groups were detected. Visitors from neighbouring countries were more likely repeated visitors to Estonia and had shorter length of stay in Estonia, but visitors from distant countries were more likely first-time visitors and they stayed in Estonia for longer."