Factors Affecting Time Spent by Near-Home Tourists in City Destinations

Limited emphasis has been placed upon empirically verifying the relationship between destination image and tourist patronage behavior. The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of city destination image along with other important variables on the travel behavior of near-home tourists living in small communities. The findings of this study show destination image, distance, family income, perceived expensiveness, and age to be influential factors on near-home travel. As well, the multiattribute attitude model has been used to calculate an image score of city destinations for near-home tourists. Substitution of this score for the unidimensional measure of image in the model causes no major changes in the findings of this study.