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Abstract
The transition into adulthood is usually associated with changes and events, accompanied by developments in young people's social status and consequently, some changes in travel and transport use. This makes the students' segment highly relevant for both marketing companies and policy-makers. The goal of this paper is to explore the overall vacation portfolio of decisions of students. Data about vacation history in terms of the long holidays of a sample of 211 students was used. To avoid any limiting a priori statistical assumptions in the analysis, the existence of any interdependencies in the vacation portfolios and their covariates are explored in this study using Association Rules Mining. Results indicate that, in addition to expected associations between socio-demographics characteristics, student's vacation choices are very heterogeneous.
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Keywords: vacation portfolio, travel behaviour, students, association rules
Citation: Grigolon, A., A. Kemperman, H. Timmermans (2012) Exploring interdependencies in students' vacation portfolios using association rules. European Journal of Tourism Research 5(2), pp. 93-105
Introduction
The students segment represents an interesting and highly relevant subject of study in vacation marketing and tourism research. Over a relative short period of time, adolescents and young adults may experience rapid changes in the contextual variables influencing their vacation decisions. They start as a family member and will likely try to influence their parents in their vacation choice. Then, at some age, they become increasingly reluctant to travel with their parents and prefer to experience a vacation on their own or with their friends. At this stage, many will still have a limited budget, but may have a lot of time. Then, gradually, vacation partners will shiftto spouses and increasing budgets will allow this segment of the population to choose from a wider set of travel options.
The study of the determinants of student's vacation choices is of both marketing and policy interest in the sense that the transition into adulthood is usually associated with changes and events, accompanied by developments in young people's social status and consequently, some changes in travel and transport use. Besides, semester breaks and other holidays gives them relatively large time blocks free from school commitments and/or work (Babin & Kim, 2001), making them quite time-flexible. Moreover, they may be...