engleski

Impacts on Internet Booking for Travel and Holiday Accommodation in Europan Countries: Multivariate Analysis Approach

An increase of Internet penetration and of percentage of Gross National Product (GDP) for public expenditure on education, as well as increased Internet skills make people better prepared to adopt Internet when purchasing services. For many European economies tourism became a major source of wealth influencing an increase of GDP per capita, taxes, employment, exports, etc., but there is a hypothesis that the opposite also holds, because the higher GDP per capita positively influence the raise of demand for tourism services purchased on-line. Since the Internet purchases are in recent years in many European countries close to prevail in tourism services retail, the authors have found challenging enough to investigate what are the most important variables that impact the Internet booking of travel and holiday accommodation in these countries. According to the latest Eurostat surveys about attitudes of Europeans towards tourism Internet remains for them the most common way to arrange holidays. E.g. in 2012 Internet is more likely to be mentioned for holiday arranging by respondents 15+ living in EU15 countries compared to those in new member states. The Internet was the most used method to arrange holidays in all but four countries: the FYR Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia and Turkey. This paper investigates impacts of economic individuals’ ICT skills related variables on Percentage of individuals who booked travel and holiday accommodation over the Internet in the last 12 months, as the main variable under study. Recent official data for 31 European countries are explored. Not only data for European Union (EU) countries, but three EU candidate countries data, for Turkey, the FYR of Macedonia and Serbia are analysed, too. The research focuses the position of the above mentioned EU candidate countries considered to be part the Western Balkans, and also the position of Croatia, the youngest EU member, compared to older member states, considering trends of Internet booking. The main variable under study and four variables that make a statistically significant impact on it are explored. After exclusion of outliers, the correlation analysis, regression modelling and cluster analysis follow. The four-cluster solution by k-means method gave somewhat different country classifications compared to hierarchical clustering. The four-cluster solution included the following clusters: Scandinavian countries ; developed North and Central European countries ; EU developing countries ; and cluster of Western Balkan countries. The newest EU member Croatia falls into the cluster of EU developing countries.

Internet booking; European Union countries; k-means clustering; hierarchical clustering; regression modeling

Ovaj rad je u potpunosti podržan od strane Hrvatske zaklade za znanost kao dio znanstvenog projekta „Statistical Modelling for Response to Crisis and Economic Growth in Western Balkan Countries“ (STRENGTHS) ; Broj projekta: 9402 ; Projektno razdoblje: 2014.-2018 ; Voditeljica: prof. dr. sc. Ksenija Dumičić