Investigating Tourists’ Willingness to Walk (WTW) to Attractions within Scenic Areas: A Case Study of Tongli Ancient Town, China

Yuanyuan Mao, Xiyuan Ren, Ling Yin, Qingying Sun, Ke Song and Wang De
Additional contact information
Yuanyuan Mao: Department of Urban and Rural Planning, School of Architecture, Soochow University, Suzhou 215123, China
Xiyuan Ren: Department of Civil and Urban Engineering, Tandon School of Engineering, New York University, New York, NY 11201, USA
Ling Yin: Shanghai Tongji Urban Planning & Design Institute Co., Ltd., Shanghai 200092, China
Qingying Sun: School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
Ke Song: College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China
Wang De: College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 23, 1-15

Abstract: This paper aims to quantify tourists’ willingness to walk (WTW) in the intra-destination choice in pedestrian scenic areas. The case study presented is the Tongli Ancient Town (Jiangsu Province, China), which has a significant number of heritage sites, but tourism management has been weak. The main objective was achieved by surveying sequential destination choices in the site, with a total of 272 interviewed tourists. A Multi-Stop Behavior Model (MBM) was constructed to identify the factors that influence tourists’ intra-destination choice and willingness to walk (WTW). On the whole, the evidence showed that tourists prefer core-area attractions to peripheral attractions. Walking distance is the most important variable in tourists’ attraction choice. Moreover, WTWs of tourist segments showed both similarities and disparities, inspiring more pertinent strategies in line with tourists’ preferences. Policy and management implications are drawn based on the empirical findings and their effects are predicted using Monte Carlo (MC) simulation.

Keywords: willingness to walk; intra-destination choice; discrete choice model; tourism management; ancient towns in the south of the Yangtze River (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/23/12990/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/23/12990/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:23:p:12990-:d:686504

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().