Demand elasticities in international marketing - A meta-analytical application to tourism

Understanding buyer behavior and demand for international travel and tourism presents an interesting problem in marketing. Its principal characteristics are that it involves complex buying behavior the tourism product is an amalgam of a wide diversity of services and goods, tourism exports require the transportation of the consumer, and purchases involve foreign currency transactions. The author discusses the buyer-behavior implications of these characteristics and reports the results of a study that assesses demand elasticities. A literature review yielded 77 empirical studies of international tourism demand, which collectively reported 10,078 demand coefficients. The majority of the coefficients were in the form of demand elasticities, and estimates of income and price elasticities represented a substantial portion of the wide variety of demand determinants studied. The estimated elasticities were integrated across studies using meta-analysis to reveal underlying patterns, and therefore generalizations, in these findings.