Senior travellers - challenge for innovative entrepreneurs

The paper outlines new challenges in tourism services market, caused by gradually increasing amount of senior travellers and proposes design of knowledge-based interactive model of this phenomenon. Finally we justify validity and show strategic usefulness of such tool for its entrepreneurial adopters. Tourism is important part of regional economy with economic and socio-cultural impacts. In this context one of the most discussed topics in European Union is social tourism. In practice, social tourism addresses senior citizens, young people, families and people with disabilities. Generally, it can be seen as an umbrella concept, incorporating many different types of initiative and public, private and third-sector stakeholders. Consequently, we analyse possibilities and limitations of senior tourism and its effects for destination. Resultant findings are transferred to computational model, where providers of services adjust their supply in accordance with existing and expected behaviour of senior travellers. To realistically formalize the suggested market structure altogether with internal characteristics of single market players in representationally transparent and computationally powerful way, we adopted agent based modelling (ABM) as the main implementation paradigm. Models, composed from artificial agents, are theoretically able to mimic any type of system. Main advantage of agents is that their characteristics are close to human understanding, so it is straightforward to describe processes or systems in terms of interacting agents. The utilization of agents in traffic or destination occupancy modelling is straightforward. Entities, moving and cumulating on real geographic background allow to analyse local throughputs and capacities in order to predict their future development. Such research focuses primarily on operational and tactical aspects of tourism. Contrariwise, we are interested mainly in strategic planning, which does not represent typical ABM task, particularly because of its inherently fragmented and limited view. On the other hand, our problem represents complex, decentralized and distributed environment with large involvement of subjective factors, where any kind of immature summarization could suppress strategically interesting patterns of emergent behaviour. We used realistic combinations of internal parameters, characterizing type of destination, supply of services and structure of travellers to setup the agents' microworlds. Incoming tourists were addressed by general marketing, word of mouth or by their loyalty to destination or provider. With these configurations we performed and discussed different scenarios, focused on senior travellers. Our results suggest convenient types of destinations and business strategies from this target group point of view.