An agent-based model of tourist movements in New Zealand : implications for spatial yield

![CDATA[Tourism is New Zealand’s fourth largest industry, providing jobs for thousands of New Zealanders and significant foreign capital for the nation’s economy. Of concern to ministry and industry decision makers is the “spatial yield” of these tourists which takes into account the spatial and temporal contributions of their movements in terms of economic, cultural and environmental impacts. We have developed an agent-based model of tourism movements to simulate these impacts and to allow for the evaluation of different scenarios (such as increases in petrol prices or variations in currency exchange rates) on the behaviours of those tourists. In order to develop realistic and grounded heuristics for the model, interview protocols were developed in order to identify the key drivers in tourists’ decision making process. 140 interviews were conducted in five locations in the Canterbury region of New Zealand’s South island. Demographics collected included gender, age, nationality, country of residence, travel group details, type of transport, and length of stay were also collected. Based on the experiences of the interviewers and a review of the results, a second interview protocol was developed which focused only on what tourists had done on the previous day or immediately before the interview. Key results from the interviews allowed us to derive several factors: Trip Type (purpose of the visit) which correlated well with itinerary types, accommodation levels, and transport types. When nationality is included, this also correlated well with total budgets. These results were compared against data collected in the annual International Visitor Survey. Interviews also revealed that the decision making process changed over the course of a trip, with decisions like accommodation booking being locked in during the first third of a trip and becoming less constrained as the trip continued. We propose a “cascading” model of decision-making where initial decisions (often made prior to arrival in New Zealand) influence the flow of later, in-country decisions. The model is being developed using Repast Simphony. The primary agents are travel groups portioned by nationality, trip type, itinerary type, accommodation level and type of transport. The preliminary model will simulate the period of 1 November 2008 to 28 February 2009 with inputs based on data from the IVS, allowing for simulations to be validated against these data. Once validated, the model will allow us to simulate different scenarios and their impact on spatial yield. In addition, the impacts of weather events and natural disasters (e.g., earthquakes and volcanic eruptions) on tourist movements. This paper presents the outlines the development of the model as well as a methodology for translating qualitative interview data into decision-making heuristics.]]