Destination Choice Experiment

A destination choice experiment is a stated-preference technique that asks travellers to choose among experimentally designed hypothetical destinations, each described by a bundle of attributes such as price, travel distance, climate, the type and quality of attractions, and crowding. Grounded in random-utility theory and the stated-choice toolkit codified by Louviere, Hensher and Swait (2000), the method estimates a discrete-choice model that recovers the implicit weight travellers place on each attribute, the trade-offs they are willing to make, and the marginal willingness to pay for improvements. Huybers (2003) applied this framework to short-break holiday destination choices, showing how designed choice tasks reveal which destination features actually drive selection. Because the attributes are manipulated by design rather than merely observed, the experiment isolates the causal effect of each feature on choice in a way that revealed-preference travel data cannot.