DOES THE GENERATION INFLUENCE DOMESTIC LEISURE TOURISM PRACTICES? THE CASE OF BULGARIA

Abstract

The main goal of the article is to study the generations that are actively participating in the tourism market at the moment and to examine their attitudes towards domestic tourism. The analyses of the generations’ domestic leisure tourism practices in Bulgaria include two-dimensional frequency distributions and statistical pair-wise hypothesis testing in order to clarify the exact differences amongst the generations studied. The study reveals that the youngest generations travel more than the elders. The top 3 ‘factors’ that burden the travelling intentions amongst the Bulgarians are: lack of financial resources, lack of enough free time and family reasons. The most significant reason for older generations not traveling is lack of enough money and for the younger is mix between lack of finance and lack of enough free time. The generations differ from each other in their travel preferences, behaviour, expectations. However, some similarities are observed between them. It is noteworthy that most respondents, regardless of the generation they belong to, have visited more summer seaside resorts than mountain winter resorts in the last five years.

Keywords

• generational theory
• domestic leisure tourism
• bulgaria
• attitudes
• generation x
• millennials
• generation z
• alpha generation
• representative survey
• hypothesis testing
• statistical analysis