An application of the diary method to data collection and analysis for the tourism sector.

Tourism plays an important role in many countries around the globe by creating foreign exchange and generating employment, and by contributing to a more balanced spread of economic activity in areas with few alternative economic opportunities. Considering this importance, the continuous growth of the sector and the increasingly competitive environment, accurate tourism statistics are vital. While there is a general agreement that the tourism statistics are suboptimal due to inappropriate data collected, little research has been conducted into investigating new ways to gather more accurate data to describe tourist behaviour. Currently most expenditure data is collected through exitsurveys, which leads to too much data-aggregation and there are also concerns regarding the quality because recall error can alter the accuracy. The diary method is well known as a tool for data-collection in many areas outside tourism-research, and has been proven to deliver more detailed and more accurate data. This thesis will investigate the use of the diary method in tourism, explore its applicability and show in a case-study how the better quality of data can be applied to gain new insights into tourist-behaviour, e.g. adding temporal and geographical dimensions to expenditure analysis. The case study analyses the spending behaviour of a specific tourist market and illustrates at the same time the innovative features of the diary method. The study reveals that the concerns surrounding the diary approach are generally unfounded. The issues that arise e.g. conditioning effect or low response rates, are less of a problem than recall error and in addition there are many corrective measures that researchers can use to avoid the consequences. Using a unique dataset comprising of 297 diary questionnaires, the expenditure analysis revealed links between the spending and different socio-demographic and trip-related characteristics of tourists. In addition, since diaries give a temporal and geographical dimension to the data, it is possible to investigate the variations in spending over the days of the trip and the mobility of tourists and their level of spending in specific areas. The study shows, for the first time, that although the level of spending for different cohorts significantly differs, the expenditure trajectory follows a general pattern regardless of the tourist group under study.