Determinants of Iranian Households’ Expenditure on Domestic Trips

Studying travel behavior is one of the fundamental necessities for the managers involved in strategic and marketing plans. Due to the scarcity of research on the Iranian tourism market, addressing the current status of the households’ tourism expenditure and its determinants might contribute to increasing this expenditure. The present study thus explores the determinants of the Iranian households’ total expenditure and expenditure per person/night on domestic trips, using a systematic approach at the microeconomic level. These determinants consist of economic, demographic, psychological, and trip-related factors that affect different sectors of the trip expenditure, including accommodation, transportation, food and beverages, shopping, recreation, and visiting tourist attractions. Using an electronic questionnaire, the information about the last trip before the outbreak of COVID-19 was collected from 629 Iranian households and analyzed by linear regression methods. The results demonstrated the effect of indicators such as income, age, education, type of occupation, the householder’s conservativeness, the number of dependent and independent children, the household size traveling, duration of stay, the importance of recreational trips in the consumer basket of the family, use of personal vehicles, and stay in the relatives’ houses, on total family expenditure and expenditure per person/night on the trip.