Emerging tourist destinations, outbound passenger trends, destination factors,
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Date
2025
Authors
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Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
UMT.Lahore
Abstract
The research is a quantitative analysis of factors on the travel destination choice of the UK
outbound travelers to visit Turkey, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirate during 2017-2023, and
how it affects the UK travel agencies. Using secondary data provided by tourism official
organizations, financial institutions, travel aggregators, social media analytics, the research
investigates five hypotheses with the help of Pearson correlation coefficients and ANOVA Single
Factor Analysis on the currency exchange rates, the cost of flights and accommodation, visa access
policy, Instagrammability, and Air Quality Index (AQI). The results show that currency
depreciation in Turkey and visa-free regimes in the UAE highly relate with the change in arrivals
of tourists originating in the UK, thus supporting expectations. On the other hand, flight and
accommodation prices in Turkey and UAE had a positive impact on the number of arrivals which
is quite counterintuitive to price elasticity as it seems that high destination attractiveness or
affordability had more of an effect here. The Instagrammability had a high positive impact on the
arrivals to every destination, which means that this positive impact is a result of profound influence
by visual social media. To the surprise, AQI was also found to have a positive association with
arrivals implying its direct negative effect may not as decisive as other variables on these
destinations. The findings offer empirical information with which the UK travel agencies can
improve their practices amidst the dynamic global tourism market.
Keywords: outbound travel in the UK, new destination, the exchange rate, cost of flights and
hotels, travel visa policy, Instagrammable (one that is popular on Instagram), Air Quality Index
(AQI), quantitative study, tourism developments, travel agents