Characteristics of tourists
A considerable amount of literature has been published on investigating the characteristics of tourists. Selecting a certain holiday destination directly depends on the individual traits and values as Kahle, Matsuura, and Stinson found out (2005). The study identifies people’s characteristics and separates them in two categories. Due to human’s personality, some individuals who are sociable and open-minded prefer active traveling, while unsociable and withdrawn people like overflowing holiday destinations. One more important thing about neurotic people is that they are less likely to visit new places.
Characteristics of tourists were also studied by Moisescu (2013) who looks closely at their social status, income, age, gender and education. The research checked for the presence of interrelation between tourists’ trip duration, traveling group size, and accommodation comfort level with regard to the above mentioned aspects. Data of this study was gathered from the survey conducted among Romanian facebook users from 19 to 35 years old. The results reveal that longer vacations and higher accommodation comfort levels preferred mostly by older people with higher income.
Additionally, Romanian women when choosing a place to go pay less attention to the level of accommodation comfort, while men are really concerned about this issue. Tourists with lower education level are more likely to go abroad with larger traveling groups, while people with higher education prefer narrow circle of people. This data is supported by Zulkifli et al. (2009), whose results show that Arab tourists go to Malaysia to spend their vacation mostly with their families.
So far, no research has been found on preferences of Kazakhstani tourists and it is unknown what destinations they choose and what affect their choice. The following section will describe the methods of gathering the data.
Methodology
To find out what places attract Almaty residents and what factors mostly influence their choices was the main purpose of the current study. As this research looked at the Almaty residents’ destination choice behavior, it was decided to use both quantitative and qualitative methods, namely questionnaire and interview. There are some advantages of using both questionnaires and interviews for this particular research. To begin with, the questionnaire is one of the more practical ways of obtaining the data as large amounts of information can be collected from a large number of people. Furthermore, computer generated questionnaire lets us to calculate the results easy and quickly. The interview with a professional working at the travel agency complements and extends the questionnaire data.
For this study the questionnaire was used to gather information about respondents’ age, gender, travelling characteristics, destination choice behavior, and the opinion about the Kazakhstani tourism. The survey was conducted in the first two weeks in March 2014. The questionnaire was created on Google Drive and distributed through e-mails and vk.com to 51 people from my friends list. The respondents were asked ten questions. One of them was open-ended, in which participants briefly explained the rating choice of the quality of tourism in Kazakhstan. As the majority of people from friends list are students, there was a request to show the questionnaire to elderly people to fill it out. Therefore, the target population was the students and their parents or relatives who live in Almaty and the ages ranged from 16 to above 50 years. By the end of the survey, a total a number the participants was 108 people with various ages. 32% of the respondents (n=35) were aged from 16 to 25 years, and 33% (n=36) were from 26 to 50 years, and remaining 34% (n=37) belonged to those who were over 50 years. The reason for choosing a big age group is that the study aims to show the tendency of travelling preferences among youth, adults, and elderly people. Almost half the sample were both male (53%, n=57) and female (47%, n=51).
For qualitative information, a semi-structured interview with an expert in this field was undertaken. The interviewee was Dinara Kaisanova, a manager of Uni Travel tourist firm. She has experience working in this particular sphere since 2008, and for the last three years she has been working as a manager in the Uni Travel agency. The interview was audio-recorded and conducted at the Uni Travel agency on 13th of March and it lasted for 25 minutes. Also, the interviewee filled the questionnaire form. In most recent studies, tourists’ preferences toward the vacation destinations have been investigated by interviewing tourists, while the data for this research was gathered from the interview with the specialist in this sphere.
This section described the methods used in this investigation and it explained the reason for choosing each method. The following section will show the results of the obtained data.
Results
In Kazakhstan the industry of tourism has become a high-priority issue not so long ago, as the citizens got the opportunity to spend their holidays not only within Kazakhstan but somewhere abroad. The main purpose of this study was to find out the most preferred travel destinations of Almaty residents and the factors that influence their choice with regard to the age group. The findings from questionnaire and interview showed that Almaty residents of various ages travel both locally and abroad. It was hypothesized that older generation is more likely than younger to spend holidays in Kazakhstan rather than abroad and that accommodation comfort is the main factor that affects their choice. The results were obtained by giving questionnaires to 108 residents of Almaty who were aged 16 and older in order to examine whether there is connection between the different age groups and destination choice behavior. Additionally, a semi-structured interview was conducted with a manager of Uni Travel agency in order to identify the places where people prefer to have a rest and the most common aspects that impact their choice. The results of the questionnaires will be presented first, followed by the findings from the semi-structured interview.
1.1 Travelling profile
Those who do not travel were excluded from the analysis. The number of excluded respondents is 8 people. Therefore, according to age groups, a total number of the respondents became equal to each other.
In order to identify the most preferred type of holiday, respondents chose between six options. As can be seen from figure 1, the largest number of respondents (n=39) chose sun holidays followed by the same number of answers for local holidays (n=18), sightseeing trips (n=18) and nature trips (n=18). Business trips were chosen by 13 people. Only two respondents chose other types of holiday which were not mentioned in the list of responses.
As for travelling companion, it was found that nearly 60% of Almaty residents (n=63) travel with family. Almost one-fourth responded that they go abroad with friends (23 percent, n=13) and half of remaining 18% of respondents travels alone or with partner/spouse.
One of the main research questions was based on finding out the most popular travel destination among residents of Almaty. Figure 2 provides the general tendency of the respondents’ preferences in regard to vacation destinations. It can be seen from the data in the in the pie chart below that the most preferred travel destination is Western Europe (21 percent, n=56), followed by Eastern Europe (18 percent, n=49), America (18 percent, n=48) and Kazakhstan (15 percent, n=40). On average, approximately the same percentage of the respondents prefer Eastern Asia (10 percent, n=26), Western Asia (7 percent, n=20) and Australia (9 percent, n=24). Not surprisingly, only very few respondents (3 percent, n=8) picked Africa as the preferred holiday destination.
1.2 Rating of tourism in Kazakhstan and decision making factors
In order to show the general attitude of Almaty residents toward tourism in Kazakhstan, the respondents were asked to rate its quality. Most of the respondents rated it as adequate (n=34) and good (n=32). Nonetheless, 20 people considered it poor and, moreover, 5 respondents found it very poor. In the following open-ended question participants of the questionnaire briefly explained why they rated the quality of Kazakhstani tourism exactly like that. Those who responded positively explained their choices saying that Kazakhstan gained its independence only in 1991, thus the industry of tourism has developed quite well for the short period. In addition to this, more than one-third of the respondents assume that sightseeing opportunities play vital role in the country’s tourism development as there are lots of interesting and historical places. On the other hand, nearly 25% of the participants considered low infrastructure as the main reason of Kazakhstan’s tourism poor development.
Some meaningful results were obtained related to the factors that influence Almaty residents’ holiday destination choice. From figure 3, it can be seen that by far the greatest demand is for sightseeing opportunities as a little more than one-fourth of the respondents (23 percent, n=25) found it most important. Approximately 20% of surveyed people indicated both accommodation comfort (n=20) and climate (n=19) as no less significant factors that have an impact on their travel destination choice. Consequently, from the results it is clear that above mentioned factors were more important than others for Almaty residents’ destination choices.
1.3 Age and destination relationship
Destination choice behavior is the main issue that is investigated in this research report. It was significant to show the connection of travelling preferences among three age groups: youth, adults, and elderly people. The trend seen in Figure 4 is that the respondents from 16 to 25 years and those above 50 years are more likely than the other age group to visit America or Eastern Europe. The results also showed that Australia, Eastern Asia and Western Europe are highly-demanded travel destinations for those who were aged from 26-50 years. The single most striking observation to emerge from the data comparison was high demand for local tourism as all three age groups preferred Kazakhstan even more than Australia, Western and Eastern Asia. Very few people from each age group preferred to spend their holidays in Africa. Overall, there was a correlation between three age groups as the largest amount of them preferred the same vacation destinations.
Figure 4: Connection between age groups and vacation destinations
In regard to the different age groups and factors that influence their choice, sightseeing opportunities have the biggest impact on younger generation and adults, followed by accommodation comfort that is preferred more by elder people (see Figure 5). The table also showed that both climate and entertainment found to be significant aspects for those who were from 26 to 50 years. The results clearly showed that food/beverages almost have no influence on youth as only one person selected this factor. Elderly people paid due attention to food/beverages and quality of service when choosing a vacation destination. Hence, it can be said that most of these differences were statistically significant.
Figure 5: Connection between age groups and factors that affect their choice
1.5 Qualitative results (interview)
As previously mentioned, a semi-structured interview with a manager of Uni Travel agency was undertaken on 13th of March. The purpose of this interview was to validate and strengthen quantitative results. Thus, the qualitative results showed that the common age group varied from young people up to 40-50 years. The interviewee confirmed that most of Almaty residents frequently travel with family or friends. Also, she claimed that most tourists prefer sun holidays. As the qualitative data shows more detailed information, the results revealed that the most preferred holiday destination is Turkey, since the majority of Almaty residents, namely 70% always spend their vacation time there. On the reasons for visiting Turkey, the interviewer emphasized that the price for this type of holiday matches its quality and, moreover, accommodation comfort also strongly influences the choice of tourists. Additionally, she noted that most of people are more likely to spend their holidays abroad than within Kazakhstan because the infrastructure of local tourism is still on the low level. In general, this information corresponded well with the quantitative results. Both questionnaire and interview findings were presented in this section. The following section of the research report will be an analysis of the obtained data.