Comparison of the Visitor Profile of 3 Sources Markets Visiting Hk

Introduction

Hong Kong as a multicultural city attracts a lot of visitors from all round the world. It is important for us to know that travelers usually will consider the geographic distance and cultural distance when traveling to one place to another. Then we can accurately plan out suitable market strategy targeting them when they visit HK. It can be proved that “how far people travel represents the end result of a series of other deterministic variables, including time availability, amount of discretionary income, costs of travel and willingness to enter a culturally different environment.” (Crouch, 1994)

Definition of Distance Decay

The theory argues that demand for tourism varies inversely with the distance traveled (Bull, 1991; Zillinger, 2005)

Definition of Cultural Distance

A concept that refers to the extent to which the tourists’ home culture differs from that of the area being visited. They suggest that relatively larger cultural distance may produce greater interest to those who wish to experience differences between the culture of their home and that of destination areas. In contrast, for visitors from proximate culture distance, culture may not be a compelling reason to visit the culturally similar destinations and different travel patterns may be evident.

(McIntosh & Goeldner 1990)

Summary

Location and time distance are crucial factors that leisure travelers taken into consideration. In this paper, Japan, Canada and UK are used for comparison. Japan is included as one of the five short haul short markets which are around 2000km away from Hong Kong. However, for Canada and UK which are defined as long haul markets and they are located in the northern hemisphere, it visitor more time and money on the travel distance compared to the Japan.

Visitor Characteristics

Different nationality has its own selection of destination. During the year of 2008, 50% of male and female Canadians came to Hong Kong for vacation. Compare to Canada,...