Modelling bimodality of length of tourist stay

Abstract

Empirically, the length of stay by tourists at their destination usually presents bimodality, overdispersion and non-zero observations, and classical distributions do not seem to fit this type of data very appropriately. In this paper, we introduce two distributions which accommodate bimodality. One is a flexible discrete distribution which can be applied to both bimodal and unimodal data sets. The second distribution is an infinite mixture model that accounts for unobserved heterogeneity in the mean parameter, thus reflecting the heterogeneous preferences of tourists. Both models are suitable for the inclusion of covariates. Our empirical results show that each of these models is suitable and provides a reasonably good fit. Of the two, the infinite mixture model is preferred.