Length of Stay at Multiple Destinations of Tourism Trips in Brazil

This study applied a shared heterogeneity duration model to tourists' length of stay at different locations of multidestination trips. This analysis helps to understand tourists' behaviors and to predict their length of stay according to relevant variables. Such information can be applied to the development of efficient marketing strategies aiming to push the average length of stay to the desired direction, and to develop on the fly service provision and revenue management strategies. The focus on multiple destination trips offers an innovative analytical perspective. A large data set of 309,000 visits to Brazilian destinations was analyzed. Several empirical findings regarding determinants of tourists' length of stay were obtained. Positively skewed distributions for duration and hazard functions were found to best fit observed data. Shared heterogeneity was found to statistically improve the explanatory capacity of duration models when multidestination tourism trips data are analyzed.