The practice of using nationality or its equivalents as a segmentation criterion in tourism research has been both warned against and advocated among tourism scholars. Whenever a nationality, country-of-residence, country-of-origin or similar variable has been included in multivariate statistical modelling, however, its role has tended to be that of one of many control variables. The main purpose of this paper is to quantify and describe more comprehensively than in past research how variations in expenditure levels are associated with the nationality of foreign tourists in Norway during the summers of 2007 and 2009. The results show that nationality has both gross and net (unadjusted and ceteris paribus) effects on expenditures, and that this variable solely accounts for over 35% of the overall explained variance in tourism expenditures. The implications of the results are discussed.
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