According to the World Tourism Organisation, a tourist is a person who visits a country in which he/she does not usually reside. The purpose of the visit must not be related to pursuing an occupation from which income is derived from the country visited. This definition is only concerned with foreign travellers (excluding domestic travellers) who are visiting foreign countries for pleasure or business. It excludes people who migrate, are on temporary work-permit visas, or are overseas students.
Certain terms in the tourism literature are used interchangeably, such as origin and tourist-generating country, destination and tourist-receiving country, and tourist and visitor. The annual or quarterly data used for different variables in tourism demand research are obtained from the countries under study or from the International Monetary Fund. In developing countries, the unavailability or paucity of data can be, and has been, a major problem encountered in tourism research.
Most tourism demand models are based on multiple regression analysis. The models could be specified as a Cobb-Douglas, linear or log-linear form. A log-linear model is commonly used, but there is no discussion in the literature as to why such a model is superior at explaining variations in the dependent variable of tourism demand models. Most authors cite computational convenience and the ease of interpretation of the parameters as constant elasticities for choosing the log-linear model, but such reasons are not adequate justifications for preferring the log-linear form (for further details, see [7]).
Tourism research typically uses tourist expenditures, tourist arrivals or total tourist arrivals per capita as the dependent variable to estimate international tourism demand. The use of tourist arrival figures ([2,5,6]) does not need to account for tourists' length of stay. However, information on the average length of stay in a country can be very useful for policy makers in tourism-related industries for investment and marketing purposes.
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