RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SPATIAL ACCESSIBILITY AND TOURISM DEMAND- CASE STUDY: TOURISM DESTINATIONS IN WESTERN MOLDAVIA (ROMANIA)

 

Mihai Bulai¹*, Mihail Eva²

¹Ph.D., Lecturer, Department of Geography, Faculty of Geography and Geology, University “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” of Iasi,  ROMANIA, mihai.bulai@uaic.ro

²Ph.D. Student, Planning and Environment Department, University François-Rabelais of Tours, FRANCE, mihail.i.eva@gmail.com

*Corresponding author

 

 

Abstract

This paper is meant to advance the comprehension of the ways that tourism destinations benefit from their level of spatial accessibility to their catchment areas, that is, to their tourism demand. Previous studies have shown that although minimum cost and effort are important factors in tourism, too much accessibility can dissuade visitors to overnight and thus to produce tourism benefits. Our first hypothesis is that the distance between destinations and origins of the potential tourists plays a non-linear role in the process of destination choice or even on the decision to leave home, which needs to be defined in terms of pattern. The second hypothesis presumes that there is a direct relationship between the travel time spent by a tourist to arrive to a destination and his tourism behaviour at the destination. The method to observe this relation was to apply a tourist-behaviour survey to relevant spatial distributed visitors from all over Romania that have visited the Western Moldavia region (northeast Romania) in the previous 3 years before the survey. National tourists represent a significant 83% of the total demand (arrivals at destinations of the case study region). Results have shown a Gaussian-type of accessibility role in tourism demand, where too much accessibility prevents tourists from consuming a lot at the destination or too low accessibility prevent potential tourists to choose a destination. The study has also revealed a complex relationship between time-distance (travel time to destination) and tourism behaviour in terms of budget spent, average stay, importance of weather in choosing to travel etc. The resulted reading grid can be used by other Romanian destinations as a planning tool in development or advertisement strategy. Furthermore, the methodology can be replicated  for creating new reading grids for tourism destinations of any country that wants to clearly define its catchment area and its potential tourism behavioural patterns.

Keywords: spatial accessibility, tourism demand, catchment area, tourist behaviour, Romania.