Transport for tourism or transport as tourism? An economic analysis of on–site travel demand.

The need for an efficient transport system is widely recognized as an important factor of a successful program of tourism development, but little work has been done to investigate the impact of Transport System (TS) on Cultural Heritage Tourism (CHT). This is one of the most commonly recognized and investigated forms of tourism but, unfortunately, there is a fragmentation in the research field that does not allow a full comprehension of existing relationships between TS, visitor targets, destinations management and tourism experience. Transport is, in effect, a key element of this. In literature the tourist experience has been defined as a whole of many kinds of services – food & wine, transports, shopping and accommodation – that supports the peak experience, referring essentially to art, culture and heritage. TS can also form the focal point of tourism activity (transport as tourism) – for example, in the case of cruising or panoramic railroad tours – or, instead, it can constitute the quicker (or cheaper) mode to travel towards the destination (transport for tourism). However there is another rather neglected aspect, in tourism research, which focuses on TS specifically dedicated to the CHT. It could be a strategic tool for the optimization and rationalization of tourism impacts on local system from the economic point of view, but also from the perspective of the destination management and local development. In effect, driving CHT flows could be an alternative to a free and independent travel experience. For example, while some cultural sites and events suffer from heavy congestion, others are little known and sparsely visited. Every destination within a certain area should be configured with appropriate facilities according to the site characteristics referring to its position on various and specific heritage routes. In this light, the work tries to evaluate the economic impact – firstly from the visitor and also from the local policy standpoint – of the on-site vs. the long-distance travel and transport, in a scenario where cultural supply is rich and varied enough, but in which the management policies of tourism services are still lacking. With this introductory aim, the first section of this work summarizes the relationships between tourism expenditure, tourism demand and TS through some references to the existing literature, while the second highlights the microeconomic approaches that are useful to evaluate the on-site transport demand relating to CHT. Applying the travel cost method, the third section describes the main results of an empirical analysis that was implemented on a sample of visitors that were intercepted at eight sites of the Metropolitan Museum System of Turin (Italy). Finally, the conclusions give some suggestions for public policy goals. The early literature has, for evaluation purposes, established a tradition of estimating the number of visitors to a certain recreational resource; this was addressed, firstly, through probabilistic models and, secondly, through the travel cost method that was applied mostly to the single environmental sites. On the contrary, cultural sites are characterized by high concentration of synergistic or substitute resources, that are located in areas not so wide, from a geographical points of view, like urban centers. In fact, the substitution between alternative sites could be considered the key element that limits the possibility to generalize the estimation results. Another important aspect is that the recreational demand function is not able to split tourists and daily visitors that do not sleep on-site but that move around the resource. Normally, it does not take into consideration the length of stay, opting for a simplification of the formal constraints relating to latent or weak separability, substitution effects and complementarity. Briefly, this empirical application tries to demonstrate the following points: a) the analysis of tourist behavior can drive the process estimation of the social benefits/costs; b) in the considered case-study, there is a willingness to pay, as a consumer surplus, for a local TS that is related to cultural resources as part of the tourist experience. For this purpose a sample of tourists was analyzed and the visitors were interviewed about their origins and how many cultural sites, museums and Savoy Residences they were willing to visit during their stay. The 2240 interviews –0.1% of the total visitors – were collected in 2009 at eight different sites (Table 1) by the Cultural Observatory of Piedmont, a public-private body that was specifically created to analyze Piedmont's tourism relating to cultural heritage. Table 2 shows the distribution of the visits and their inter-relationships. For the evaluation of transport demand, the data analyzed supports the initial hypothesis of considering the entire metropolitan museum system and not a single recreational site, taking into consideration the entire annual flow of visitors as a driver in tourism hospitality policies. To do this, an adapted version of the travel cost method was applied. The parameters of the initial demand function, in its reduced form, are summed up in Table 3, that also brings back the final demand function and the benefits estimation. Different possibilities are considered for this, in addition to the hypothesis of not provision or status quo: the first extends the service up to a range of 5 km. from the city center, while the second reaches the Savoy Residences immediately outside the city in a range of 15 km. and the third extends the transport to the farthest residence – Racconigi Castle – which is located about 40 km. from the city center. The conclusions highlight the following topics: a) scholars have not reflected sufficiently on the nature of the consumption of cultural goods such as recreational resources and, in particular, on the complementarity, as well as substitution, between them; b) tourist behavior is highly affected by time and budget constraints and should therefore be evaluated positively; c) the territorial variable should never be overlooked in the choice of the valuation model; d) Transport costs, besides being an instrumental variable which is essential to evaluate the recreational function, does not play a secondary role in structuring the tourist supply or in affecting the demand; It should therefore never be neglected in any local development policy. Finally, the conclusions are consistent with the status quo of Turin’s cultural recreational system. Probably, in a hypothetical scenario, long-distance visitors might be interested to find a specifically organized transport supply at a low cost. From the utility theory point of view, people who have already spent a lot to travel from distant locations have a lower residual surplus. As regards, more specifically, today the public planning policies in relation to the Savoy Residences system, has not an integrated local transport which allows to reach all sites with a single modality. There are only few opportunities that are offered by specific associations or tour operators including some transport facilities. Regarding the supply related to other cultural goods networks, comparable with the Savoy Residences, the integration between the transport system and tourism is not well developed. Only some pilot projects exist, which are specific outputs of European projects. Briefly, this work shows that the tourism product relating to the cultural heritage is not sufficiently developed by the local system and, as a result, the tourist supply is not structured enough in respect to the various segments of demand. This conclusion supports the extreme topicality of this research that, through the benefits evaluation for a local tourism transport, wished to draw the scholars attention to a frequently neglected issue.