Tourist preferences for rural house stays: Evidence from discrete choice modelling in Spain

Abstract

Although the appeal of rural houses for tourists lies mainly in the natural surroundings and their intrinsic rural characteristics, there are other factors which are also important such as their size, type of building, quality of equipment, services and activities offered. To evaluate the tourists' preferences for these potential or effective attributes, a stated preference experiment was conducted in the Northwest area of the Region of Murcia and the data are analysed using discrete choice modelling methodology. Consistent specifications for multinomial logit and mixed logit models that consider variations in tastes within tourists' preferences are found. The results could be of use to promoters and owners of rural houses when planning marketing and promotional campaigns or when taking effective investment decisions.

Introduction

The number of rural holiday accommodation units and their consumers has continuously and rapidly grown in Spain in past years (National Bureau of Statistics, www.ine.es). These rises can be explained by the changes in behaviour of consumers of tourism and the search for new products which allow them more independence and flexibility and which meet their immediate needs and wishes (Aguiló and Juaneda, 2000, Hummelbrunner and Miglbauer, 1994, Yagüe, 2002). A second explanation lies in public administration initiatives aimed at promoting the development of some economically and socially depressed rural areas (Dernoi, 1991, Fleischer and Felsenstein, 2000, Valdés and Del Valle, 2003, Yagüe, 2002).

The typology of accommodations in the Spanish rural tourism market is very varied (Albacete-Sáez, Fuentes-Fuentes, & Lloréns-Montes, 2007). Among the establishments offering accommodation can be found rural hotels, rented houses, campsites and what are known as ‘rural houses’, which have been the main rural tourism product offered in Spain since its beginnings in the mid 1980s. Rural houses have a series of characteristics which distinguish them from other types of lodging and which are the result of a philosophy inherent to this type of tourism. Thus they are located within a rural environment, they offer a limited number of rooms/beds for guests, they are equipped with basic services, and they should be architecturally consistent with the surrounding style (Valdés & Del Valle, 2003).

In Spain, rural houses were developed as a strategy for the survival of small family farms and today they play an important role in the social and economic development of rural destinations (Barke, 2004, Cánoves et al., 2004). However, they are generally small, independent and family-run establishments and so often lack the resources to promote themselves adequately and they have difficulties in adapting to current market mechanisms, which are becoming extremely competitive and which are dominated by communication and promotion techniques (Gannon, 1994).

From the tourist's perspective, the appeal of rural houses lies firstly in the natural surroundings and their intrinsic rural characteristics, but other factors play important roles in their selection. Characteristics like size or type of building, the quality of the furnishing and the services and activities offered may all be decisive when opting for one rural home or another. Hence, evaluation of tourist preferences with regard to these factors is potentially an important tool for defining and developing strategies to adapt, to increase and to improve the attraction of rural houses. Information about tastes and needs of tourists according to attributes of the rural houses may therefore be useful and significant in developing and promoting the supply of rural tourism in an area.

This paper evaluates tourists' preferences and their willingness-to-pay for the potential or effective attributes of the rural houses in an accommodation choice context. To do this, a stated preference experiment that considers the most important attributes for the rural houses in Spain was conducted in the Northwest area of the Region of Murcia. In this experiment, the tourists were asked to choose between two hypothetical rural houses that differed in terms of their attributes or the option to ‘stay at home’. The data are analysed using discrete choice modelling methodology.

The study uses multinomial logit modelling with a focus on capturing systematic heterogeneity to analyse the existence of variations in consumer likes regarding rural houses' attributes. This specification tests whether the utility parameters are constant across individuals or vary specifically for certain segments. However, the logit is unable to deal with unobserved heterogeneity of the tourists, so mixed logit specifications are also estimated. Heterogeneity preferences can be found by assuming that the coefficients vary among tourists. The results of these estimations are compared with those obtained from previous logit specifications.

This conceptual and empirical approach offers a means of assessing the suitability of discrete choice modelling to rural accommodation choice. It also proposes the use of models that provide improved fits over logit and that show large heterogeneity in tourists' preferences. The findings may help promoters and owners of rural accommodations to improve the offer of the destination when planning marketing and promotional campaigns or in making effective investment decisions (Dávila et al., 2002, Sharpley and Sharpley, 1997).