Increase of tourists’ length of stay in Brazil: New tourists or new behaviors?

Abstract

The average duration of tourism trips has decreased all over the world. However, curiously, this trend has not been observed in the Brazilian inbound tourism. There are two hypotheses for explaining this uncommon Brazilian reality: changes in the behavior of tourists visiting Brazil, and changes in the composition of the Brazilian inbound tourism flow. The endorsement of the first hypothesis would show that the evolution of tourist behavior over the last years was actually different in Brazil and in the rest of the world. This would evidence the occurrence of improvements in the quality of tourist experiences offered by Brazil. The present study aims to test this hypothesis by using duration models to analyze more than 211 thousand tourist surveys. Modeling individual tourist behavior allows to control for intervenient variables and to conduct a detailed analysis of the time effect on the expected tourists’ length of stay. Thirteen duration models are tested. The model with Weibull distributed hazard and Gamma distributed individual heterogeneity is selected. The estimates show that the increasing trend of tourists’ length of stay in Brazil is partially explained by changes in tourists’ behavior.

Keywords

• Permanência
• Duração
• Estada
• Modelos de duração
• Turismo no Brasil.