The purpose of this study is to estimate convention participants' willingness-to-pay for tour programs and to understand the determinants of tourism market segmentation and the extent of their affect on segmentation, thus offering useful insights for ...
The purpose of this study is to estimate convention participants' willingness-to-pay for tour programs and to understand the determinants of tourism market segmentation and the extent of their affect on segmentation, thus offering useful insights for tourism market segmentation and for setting up strategies for convention destination marketing in Seoul. The subjects of this study were participants of corporate meetings, incentive travel, conventions and exhibitions held at the Convention & Exhibition Center, Grand Inter-Continental Hotel and COEX Inter-Continental Hotel in Seoul. Surveys were carried out, the sample being allocated with consideration to the number of participants per each event between June 1, 2004 and October 30, 2004. Also, in order to compare with convention participants, interviewers were sent to twice a week Incheon International Airport, Itaewon, Myeongdong and the Seoul City Tour Bus on a total of six occasions during the month of October, 2004 to conduct surveys on regular inbound tourists. The total size of the sample was 559 of which 492 showed no missing value against the factors needed for final analysis and were for analysis as an effective sample. SPSS 12.0 for window was used to analyze the collected data on which descriptive statistics, factor analysis, cluster analysis and one-way ANOVA were carried out. Also, the LIMDEP(LlMited DEPendent variable models) 8.0 was used in estimating the willingness-to-pay for tour programs through the contingent valuation method, and in analyzing the determinants of tour types using the multinomial choice model.
A summary of the analyzed results is as follows. First, the estimating results of the log logit model according to the single bound contingent valuation method showed that the variables affecting the willingness-to-pay for tour programs were the participant's preferred type of tour, nationality, level of education, prior experience of a city tour, purpose of visit, the offered price of the tour, and the number of prior visits to Korea. Subjects were willing to pay an average of $90.31 for tour programs of the Seoul area, with meeting, convention and exhibition participants showing a willingness-to-pay of $92.25, incentive travel participants $97.24, and other tourists $85.23.
Second, the estimating results of the multinomial logit model showed the decisive determinants of tour types to be gender, age, nationality, prior visits to Korea, those accompanying the person, the purpose of the visit, and the willingness-to-pay for the tour program. Variables other than the level of education such as demographic variables including gender and age did not show a statistically significant difference with willingness-to-pay. Through the estimating results of the multinomial Iogit model, determinants of tourism market segmentation such as demographic characteristics, the type of visit, the purpose of the visit, and the willingness-to-pay were derived for the six clusters (namely, the groups wanting historic experiences, the group perferring all tourism activities, the group not wanting active tourism, the group indifferent to tourism, the group wanting unique cultural experiences, the group wanting to shop and experience Korean food) and tour programs were offered for each individual target market.
This study is significant in that the MICE (meeting, incentive, convention, exhibition) market which is recently rising as a high-profit segment market was included as a subject of the study, and by confirming the high willingness-to-pay has proven the added value of the convention market from where we can expect great economic implications. Also, this study has shown theoretical insights in that it has applied the multinomial choice model, which is originally used in marketing studies on how consumers make choices in purchasing goods, in analyzing the preference of tour programs, as well as the contingent valuation method which is widely used in assessing non-market values in assessing tour programs. At this point in time when the convention industry is now being perceived as a high value added industry which makes up for the low demand for tourism during the off-seasons and is continuously expanding in its economic and social implications with its growth into a comprehensive industry, this study provides insights on the development of tourism products which maximize the satisfaction of convention participants and make them want to revisit Korea as well as practical insights in the area of convention planning in order to enhance the international competitiveness of Seoul as a host of conventions. In this paper, a fast motion search algorithm that performs motion search for variable blocks in integer pixel unit is proposed. The proposed method is based on the successive elimination algorithm (SEA) using sum norms to find the best estimate of motion vector and obtains the best estimate of the motion vectors of blocks, including 16×8, 8×16, and 8×8, by searching eight pixels around the best motion vector of 16×16 block obtained from all candidates. And the motion vectors of blocks, including 8×4, 4×8, and 4×4, is obtained by searching eight pixels around the best motion vector of 8×8 block The proposed motion search is applied to the H.264 encoder that performs variable blocks motion estimation (ME). In terms of computational complexity, the proposed search algorithm for motion estimation (ME) calculates motion vectors in about 6.3 times speed compared with the spiral full search and 5.5 times speed compared with the motion estimation method using hierarchical sum of absolute difference (SAD) of 4×4 blocks, while it shows 0.1~0.4 peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) drop in comparison to the spiral full search.