Tourist Behaviour and Repeat  Visitation to Hong Kong

This article contributes to the growing literature on repeatvisitation by investigating the ­relationship between tourismbehaviour and repeat visitation. The data concern a sample of vacationvisitors from Mainland China to Hong Kong in 1999. The study revealsthat repeat visitors stay longer, take fewer activities and areinvolved more in local life-related activities. Furthermore, suchrepeat visitors spend larger sums on shopping, meals, hotel bills, local transport, etc. Results of the multivariate analysis show that, while the socio-economic ­characteristics of visitors aremostly insignificant, the number of visits is a significant variablepositively contributing to the total spending and the spending onshopping, local transportation, meals outside of the hotel and hotel.In other words, repeat visitors are more beneficial economicallyto a destination than first-time visitors. The findings of thispaper enrich the ­current literature about repeat visitationby demonstrating that repeat visitors and first-time visitors havesignificantly different tourist behaviour in terms of spending andlength of stay, etc. The implication is that these two groups ofvisitors should be treated as two distinct ­market segmentsfor developing marketing strategies and tourism programmes.