An Analysis of factors influencing revisit intention of Chinese tourists towards Chiang Mai: evidence from cox proportional hazard model

Abstract

Chiang Mai has been being considered as one of most popular travel destination in Thailand with its economy heavily tied to tourism for ages. Considering an international arrival, Chinese tourist is no doubt the largest inbound proportion traveled in Chiang Mai with its maturing in outbound tourism market and an increasingly number of visits in Chiang Mai over time. Due to the precedence of revisiting in the issues of the cost-effectiveness of boosting a number of tourists and the path of sustainable tourism as it generates loyal tourists to a destination. Aiming to foster the potential of Chiang Mai tourism by increasing a number of revisitor, this study investigates the factors that influence the Chinese tourists' revisit intention and the length of returning time toward Chiang Mai. Self-administrative survey data were analyzed through Survival Analysis, using the Cox Proportional Hazards model which allows us to investigate the factors that statically affect the length of tourists' returning time. Lastly, the results were estimated through the Lasso estimation to estimate the coefficients and perform variable selection simultaneously. The results show that gender and income do not significantly affect the duration of returning. The 21-30 years old Chinese tourists take the majority of the random sample. The younger tourists tend to revisit the place sooner than the elder. Interestingly, most of the respondents was travel alone yet have never been in Chiang Mai before. Remarkably, the tourists who had more experience in Chiang Mai before tend to return very sooner. Furthermore, a business owner and a freelancer are the group of occupation which has potential to revisit Chiang Mai sooner than others. Moreover, the study found that the shorter of distance from their starts to Chiang Mai leads the shorter of time they were willing to return the place. Furthermore, the destination satisfaction factors that significantly accelerate the revisit incidences in Chiang Mai are activities and events. Nevertheless, air quality, convenience and the price of transportation, safety and security during traveling are vulnerable factors to the decision of tourists' revisiting which the expected returning date would be retard on condition that one of these factors could not satisfied the tourist's satisfaction.