Domestic leisure traveler purchase and consumption systems.

Leisure travelers visiting overnight destinations complete a series of related purchases that may be viewed usefully as a leisure travel consumption system. Certain travel-related purchases in one product-service category trigger additional purchases in other product-service categories. This article reports findings of an empirical study that support the above core proposition. For this study, analyses were conducted on the unit record data of overnight domestic travelers (n = 27,653 households) in the Australian National Visitor Survey (NVS) 1998 study on the characteristics and travel patterns of domestic tourists. A core proposition for doing the research work reported here is that understanding domestic overnight travel behavior requires examining tourism consumption systems rather than only focusing on two or three variable relationships. The theoretical logic of focusing on tourism trips as a unit of analysis rather than variable relationships is applicable through field studies of tourism consumption systems.