Destination Portfolios Using a European Vacation Style Typology

Two concepts are discussed in this study: (1) an a posteriori segmentation with psychographic variables and (2) customer loyalty in tourism. It tries to overcome the insufficiency of lifestyle segmentation detected in explaining tourism behaviour by exploiting the advantage of the multivariate nature of combined motivational and behavioural patterns of tourism demand. The segmentation task exercised with the neurocomputing technique of self-organising feature maps (SOM) resulted in a European vacation style typology of nine different prototypes. When merging two samples of vacationers, a travel survey in five generating countries and the National Austrian Guest Survey, by means of the condensed psychographic profiles it is possible to generate synergy in the process of data analysis. Both data sets shed light on Austria as a tourism destination from different perspectives. When exploiting the information that refers to loyalty and destination preferences there is no barrier to break up the corset...