The Willingness to Recommend a Visit to the Azores: A Hierarchical Ordered Probit Model with Application to Scandinavian Tourists

Tourism is a growing activity around the world and tourism destinations compete fiercely in order to attract tourists. It is usually recognized that the satisfaction that tourists have with the destination is an important way of attracting an increasing number of tourists in the future. Such a process of spreading the recommendation to visit the destination is very important for regions such as the Azores where tourism is still at a very early stage of development. The main goal of this paper is to analyze this topic in the case of the Azores. For this purpose, we use representative data in order to examine to what extent those who visited that region would recommend it to other people. The answer is then conditioned on a set of variables such as the characteristics of the individual and his overall level of satisfaction with the trip using a hierarchical ordered probit model.