Measuring Tourist Attitudes and Consumer Behavior (original) (raw)

2018, International Journal of Food and Beverage Manufacturing and Business Models

This article explores the general profile and behavior of tourists coming to Crete, and shows how qualitative, multistate data from a tourist survey can be used in market segmentation research using explanatory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and cluster analysis. The primary audience for this study consists of tourism industry practitioners interested in a practical, cost-effective approach to market segmentation analysis. For this study, around 2100 questionnaires were given to tourists who were about to leave Chania at the end of their stay during the 2017 touristic season. After collecting the data and preparing the final database a descriptive data analysis was conducted. Then factor analysis was applied using the principal component analysis (PCA) method. The next step was to apply a cluster analysis with the K-means method. Finally, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to test the goodness of fit of a prior specified model based on previous studies. The C...