The Usefulness of Flash Eurobarometer to Study Changes in Tourists' Preferences

Abstract

The effective functioning of tourist enterprises requires, among others, good knowledge of their customers’ purchasing preferences. Secondary sources, e.g. the available research reports, may turn out helpful in this respect. The purpose of this article is to assess the usefulness of Flash Eurobarometer research results to analyse changes in the European tourists’ preferences, with particular emphasis on Poles and Slovaks. As it turns out, the aforementioned source of information is not free from certain deficiencies. It mainly refers to the systematic changes made in terms of the substantive scope of the measuring instrument, i.e. the questionnaire. They consist in introducing new questions to the questionnaire, changes in previous questions and variants of answers to the questions. Such changeability reduces significantly the possibility of comparing information in the studied period and their usefulness for entrepreneurs and representatives of the world of science.

Keywords

• Flash Eurobarometer
• tourists’ preferences
• source of information