Facility preferences for new normal tourism: an empirical study using conjoint analysis

ABSTRACT

The tourism and hospitality industry has badly infected by the spread of the corona virus. Such a slowdown for this industry has put millions of jobs at risk, thereby threatening the generation of GDP share through tourism activity. Tourists" preferences have changed with giving priority to safety measures in this "new normal" era. To regain the prosperity, it is essential to understand this changing perspective of tourists. A conjoint analysis is carried out in this paper to know the combination of preference factors of different attributes related with domestic tourism among the Indians during COVID-19 pandemic. Attributes and their different levels related to tourism were prepared according to experts" suggestion. Logistic regression has been performed to find out the demographic and socio-economic factors that influence the preferred level of the selected attributes. The idle combination for tour is found as short duration tour, train as transport vehicle, online booking, at least twice room cleanness, remote area, small group of accompany, hotel with medical facility, money spent towards health and hygiene, food service at hotel and mask carries by himself/herself. Order of the selected attributes has been assigned based on their importance. This study would help the tourism industry to think over the new preferences and provide better service to satisfy the tourist. This study may highlight a few policy recommendations so that tourism authority can design customized tourism packages.