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This study investigates the prospects for the development of a commercial space travel industry with regard to public interest and potential demand. Developments occurring to stimulate and create such an industry are reviewed and market research studies conducted in recent years are summarised. The results of a similar Australian study based on a sample of Melbourne residents are reported which indicate that the attitudes and interests of respondents toward public space travel are generally consistent with the results from studies conducted in other cultures. The findings suggest that, conceptually at least, a majority of respondents would like to travel into space if they could, but cost, safety, and product design factors would have a significant impact on consumer response. Demographic and behavioural characteristics of consumers are also strongly associated with these attitudes and interests. However, in terms of the predictive value of the potential size of the eventual market, these results have major limitations. The paper provides some commentary on how future research may substantially address these limitations.

The demand elasticities in the international marketing of travel and tourism are examined through a literature review of 77 empirical studies. Results across studies were compared to determine where they were different and similar. Income and price are found to explain the demand for international tourism in most of the studies although variations across studies are observed. Meta-analysis shows that a substantial part of the variation is the result of study artifacts, which are most notably sampling errors.

Tourists make two fundamental decisions when they travel: where to go (destination) and what to do (experience/activity). Whereas the modeling of destination choice behavior has a substantial research history, there has been little research that has sought to model and explain the choice behavior of tourists when deciding what type of vacation experience they wish to undertake. To address this gap, this study investigates how experience types are related with regard to actual past tourism consumption and preferred future experience choice. In order to investigate these relationships, the authors employed latent class modeling on survey data from a sample of respondents who had reported their recent and intended future vacation travel choices and preferences. Despite the acknowledged importance of variety seeking in a tourism choice context, the study found strong evidence for the stability of preferred experiences. In addition, it found insightful patterns of association between experience types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into tourism phenomena is regarded as a multidisciplinary quest, but to date no work has endeavored to quantify or characterize the extent to which various scholarly disciplines and research fields inform our scholarly discourse. The purpose of this analysis was to assess the multidisciplinary character of tourism research between 1980 and 2010. Previous efforts to analyze the use of the literature from other disciplines have been significantly limited. In this study, we sought to address this need by analyzing a sample comprising nearly 3,000 citations from tourism research articles published in a range of tourism journals stratified by journal ranking and time period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses meta-analysis to examine the relationship between estimated international tourism demand elasticities and the data characteristics and study features that may affect such empirical estimates. By reviewing 195 studies published during the period 1961–2011, the meta-regression analysis shows that origin, destination, time period, modeling method, data frequency, the inclusion/omission of other explanatory variables and their measures, and sample size all significantly influence the estimates of the demand elasticities generated by a model. Moreover, the demand elasticities at both product and destination levels are generalized by statistically integrating previous empirical estimates. The findings of this meta-analysis will be useful wherever an understanding of the drivers of tourism demand is critically important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]