Stability and Variability in Destination Choice for Leisure Activities

Empirical research has shown that people’s daily life consists of highly stable, repetitious behaviors as well as of significant sequences of variability. This does not only concern activity patterns, but also refers to travel mode and destination choice. Within travel demand modelling, destination choice is dependent on capturing the mechanisms that lead to behavioral stability or variability in order to point out the changeability of destination choices. This research addresses the modeling of destination choices of different leisure purposes by considering spatio-temporal relationships towards certain destinations by using a longitudinal data set. Three dimensions of heterogeneity are accounted for: the inter-travel-purpose, the inter-traveller and the intra-traveller-related dimension. Considering these, the developed destination choice model estimated with the six-week Mobidrive study contains a differentiation between five sub-purposes of leisure, assumes latent classes among the respondents revealing different preferences. Furthermore, the study accounts for both spatial and temporal destination choice patterns of individuals. The classes reveal destination choice behavior to be different between individuals having both stable and variable preferences and further reacting differently to accessibility and attractiveness. While it is applied to leisure travel, the proposed model including additional components is applicable to all travel purposes in an agent based travel demand framework.