Social influence and bandwagon effects in tourism travel

This paper studies bandwagon effects in tourism travel decisions. We examine how social influence affects individual decisions (i) to take a vacation trip, and (ii) the choice of destination. We use representative microdata for 28 European countries between 2014 and 2016 involving more than 60,000 individuals. Our empirical model accounts for the potential endogeneity of the social influence effect using a control function approach. Our results show that tourism participation and abroad travelling exhibit bandwagon effects: both are positively influenced by the share of people in the region of residence (NUTS 2) that also travels and that travels abroad. We also find that (i) bandwagon effects are heterogeneous across countries, and (ii) social effects are larger among non-travellers in the previous year.(c) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.