Tourism Location Choice of Local and Foreign Tourist: A Perspective through Spatial Analysis

The economic outreach of tourism businesses has undoubtedly had a significant contribution to the economic growth of countries and regions. Attracting tourists to the tourist provinces is an important regional growth and development issue. The main aim of this study is to present the factors influencing the tourism location choice of both foreign and domestic tourists. Cross-sectional spatial analysis is applied to Turkish province-level data for 2002-2019, and the time and spatial effects of regional tourism demands are considered. Lisa and Geary’s cluster maps provide the regional clusters. Accordingly, Bitlis, Siirt and Tunceli are the common low-tourist number provinces surrounded by low-ranking provinces (low-low cluster), whereas Burdur is the common low province surrounded by high-ranking provinces (low-high cluster). Both domestic and foreign tourist location choices were strictly influenced by their choice in 2002, i.e., time consistency in location choice is valid. The location choices do not depend on whether the province is on the seaside or inland, which is contrary to our expectations. Foreign tourists’ location choices are influenced by domestic tourists’ location choices three times more than that domestic tourists. Most importantly, according to the spatial autocorrelation results, location choice made by foreign tourists is spatially dependent, but this is not true for domestic tourists.