Abstract ID: 3.11416 | Accepted as Talk | Talk | TBA | TBA

Private vehicle is a dominant transportation mode in long distance vacation travel within continental Europe (Bursa, 2024), which incurs negative external costs, particularly harmful in sensible mountain environments. Efforts are being made to shift travelers to other modes of transportation, such as rail, but with little effect so far. Meanwhile, a number of studies suggest that the availability of public transportation (Dolnicar et al., 2010), its quality and level of integration with other transportation services (Bursa et al., 2024) may significantly increase the likelihood of choosing rail for a vacation trip. And this at a much lower cost than investing in heavy infrastructure to improve travel times, or subsidizing train tickets. Building on this work, in this study we look deeper into the preferences of travelers towards mobility-related attributes of vacation destination by confronting them with a best-worst scaling (BWS) exercise. The respondents were asked to select the best and worst attributes of a destination that would make them travel by train, from among a number of features such as bus frequency, mobility hub, sharing/pooling services, destination-specific mobile application, amenities offered at the hotel, but also various flavors of restrictive measures such as parking and car access policies. They also had to choose whether they would travel to this destination by rail, given the attribute profile presented. By means of logit models, we elicit individuals’ preferences towards the attributes. An additional question with binary choice further allows for market share analysis and to identify the minimum profile of attributes that are absolutely necessary for respondents to opt for rail. We take into account observed and unobserved heterogeneity in the study population to identify personal characteristics that make an individual more sensitive to selected attributes, and attempt to group them into clusters with common characteristics. The results allow us to formulate recommendations to tourist destinations on what investments, policies and operational changes they should adopt and what implications these will have for the modal share of rail in vacation travel.