Analyzing the Effective Factors on the Number of National Tourists and Tourist's Length of Stay: A Province-wide Study

In these study effective factors on attracting tourist and the length of the time the tourist accommodates is analyzed. To do so panel data with the information of 31 provinces during (2011-2014) is used. The results show that both supply side factors (number of accommodation, number of beds of medical centers, government's credit, province’s freeways), and some of the province's tourism attractions (natural and cultural attractions) has significant effect in tourist decision to travel and the number of the tourists. Also tourists’ length of stay and the geographical distance has a negative impact on the number of tourists.While supply side factors’ effect on the length of tourist accommodation is not significant but personal features like tourist income and some of the region's feature like population, number of specialists, number of university students and also natural attractions in tourist destination are effective on tourists ‘length of stay.
Introduction Tourism industry development has lots of benefits, like job creation, economic growth and income distribution improvement in the region meanwhile, many researchers believe that the positive effects of tourism on communities depends on the time length the tourists stay.
But most of the studies, without paying attention to the time length of stay, has considered the number of the tourists especially the foreign tourist while due to Michel Porter’s theory (1990), competitive advantage, to develop tourism industry first domestic tourism should be in consider. Porter believes the industries could succeed the global competition that, the firms of the industry promote their performance and ability by creating competition within the country. So, different region’s competition within the country is important in tourism industry development. So in this study Effective Factors on the Number of National Tourists and the length of Stay in among provinces of Iran is analyzed.
Materials and Methods Based on the literature and previous studies the effective factors on the number of the tourists and the length of stay divides in to three groups, the first group is related to the supply side factors including infrastructures like nation’s accommodation, transportation infrastructure, and health level and government credits. The second group includes tourism region features like population, the number of cultural centers and natural attractions. And the third group is related to the tourist’s individual characteristics like income. So the analyzing model is presented below.
In which t shows the time and i is the province and also NTU, LTU, HO, TWA, BE, HS, CR, NCU, EDU,DS, GDPN, PU ,DI and X are respectively number of the tourists, tourist dwelling length in terms of day, The total number of nation’s accommodation ,main roads length including highways and freeways in terms of Kilometer, health index in terms of the number of beds of province’s medical centers, health index in terms of specialist, government’s province’s development credits in terms of billion riyals, the number of cultural centers , the number of university students, Dummy variable for the northern provinces and Tehran, province’s per capita income (except destination province) , population , Geographical distance and controlling factors. To evaluate the above models panel data approach with the information of 31 provinces of Iran during (2011-2014) is used.
Discussion and Results The results show that both supply side factors (number of accommodation, number of beds of medical centers, government's credit, provinces’ freeways,) and some of the provinces’ tourism attractions (natural and cultural attractions) has positive and significant effect on the number of the tourists. While the results show that supply side factors’ effect on the length of tourist stay is not significant but personal features like tourist income and some of the region's feature like population, number of specialists, number of university students and also natural attractions in tourist destination has significant effect on tourist accommodation length.
Conclusion According to the results above, tourism development needs to consider both dimensions: public infrastructures and facilities beside creating and introducing tourist attractions. Of course the importance of each dimension depends on the province‘s condition in terms of the number of the tourists and length of stay and to develop national tourism industry each province’s performance should be considered according to two variables number of the tourists and length of stay. And it is significant to know that, facility creating has an important role in attracting tourists but for increasing the length of stay each province’s abilities and attractions in different aspects should promote.