Tourism demand in Spaintrip duration and budget structure, a comparison of low cost and legacy airline users

Resumen

This thesis compares the behaviour of tourists arriving to Spain by low cost airlines or by legacy airlines, in terms of length of stay and travel budget allocation. It also segments low cost users according to travel budget composition (share allocated to transportation expenses, and to at-destination expenses, both basic –accommodation and food– and discretionary –activities and shopping). Length of stay is analyzed with an ordered logit model to account for multimodality. For expenditure composition analysis, the compositional data analysis methodology is used. Both approaches are completely new to tourism research. A relevant and recurrent finding in this thesis are the small differences encountered between the users of both types or airline. The thesis makes original contributions both regarding the variables included and the methods used