AIEST Best Contribution Award

From broken hearts to tourism expenses

This summer, Miriam Scaglione, Honorary Professor at the Institute of Tourism (ITO) of HES-SO Valais-Wallis, presented the results of a research project on tourism expenditure carried out with Professor Juan Gabriel Brida (GIDE, Department of Quantitative Methods) and Dr. Leonardo Moreno (IESTA, Department of Quantitative Methods), both from the Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences at the University of the Republic (UDELAR) in Uruguay. The paper, entitled Tourism expenditures analysis using vines copulas: the case of Fribourg, won the Best Contribution Award at the 72nd AIEST conference, held in Madrid from August 27 to 30, 2023.

The Institute of Tourism warmly congratulates its honorary professor and welcomes this new distinction, the outcome of a fruitful collaboration with UDELAR Business School.

The originality of this research lies in the adaptation of a model used in actuarial sciences showing an increase in mortality among widows/widowers [Parkes, C. M., Benjamin, B., Fitzgerald, R. G. (1969)] to the analysis of the structure of tourist spending in a destination. The underlying idea is that, just as the life expectancy of each member of a couple should not be considered independent of the other, the same applies to tourist spending on different services (restaurants, leisure activities, souvenirs, ski lifts, transport, food, etc.). Using this type of model, the prize-winning authors were able to highlight the interrelationships between the different types of expenditure in order to construct an interrelationship tree, as shown in the figure below, in the case of tourists, i.e. visitors who stay in the destination for more than one day. Restaurant spending, at the root of the tree, shows its discriminating power in relation to other spending, since it is positively related to spending on souvenirs and leisure, suggesting that data on restaurant spending contains information on other types of spending that are relevant to decision- makers in a tourist destination.