The expenditure and stay behaviour of visitors in a nature-based destination: The case of Costa Rica

Resumen

In this article we get deeper understanding on the particularities of visitors arriving to a nature-based tourist destination as this is. Building on a survey of more than 14,000 questionnaires for years 2009-2011, we investigate the behaviour of tourists coming to a salient country of the region, Costa Rica. With this aim, we estimate two equations in order to understand the main factors explaining expenditure and stay patterns of international tourists arriving to several destinations in the country. In particular, we test for the role played by time and budget restrictions, socio-economic features of visitors and those of places visited, and previous knowledge of the destination. Given the rich data set we count on, we also analyse determinants of visitor´s behaviour by segments of people, that is, according to the duration of their stay (short versus long stays), company during the visit (alone, with couple, fiends or with the family), level of relative income, particular locations visited, and activities developed along the stay. regarrding our results, we observe interesting behavioural differences emerging between groups of tourists in our sample. Furthermore, we are able to compute the elasticities arising between expenditure and stay duration for defined segments of tourists arriving to Costa Rica, what allows us to identify the presence of differing behaviour of tourists according to their personal profiles and the characteristics of their holiday trip. All these findings help us to improve the knowledge on visitor´s behaviour arriving to nature-based tourist places, as well as obtaining interesting conclusions for destination management in a sustainable basis for this type of locations.