Travel Planning

The visitor experience of place is inextricably linked to our ability to travel around an area at will, yet this mobility creates many
problems especially in scenic rural areas of the UK. The study presented here attempts to unravel visitors’ experiences of mobility using Moscovici’s social representations approach. Travel diaries were employed to explore visitors’ transport choices and mobility patterns during the peak season in Purbeck, Dorset, UK. Analysis focuses on how such patterns reflect a social representation of mobility and the implications this has for visitor travel at destinations.

Through an empirical study among holiday travellers, residing in the Former Soviet Union Republics, this paper presents a comprehensive view of role and impact of social media on the whole holiday travel planning process: Before, during and after the trip, providing insights on usage levels, scope of use, level of influence and trust. Findings suggest that social media are predominantly used after holidays for experience sharing. It is also shown that there is a strong correlation between perceived level of influence from social media and changes made in holiday plans prior to final decisions. Moreover, it is revealed that user-generated content is perceived as more trustworthy when compared to official tourism websites, travel agents and mass media advertising.

Comparisons of cycling have often been made between different cities and different countries but very little work has examined variations in cycling across metropolitan areas. The reinvigorated interest in cycling for urban transport, from policy makers and the public, means there is an urgent need to improve our understanding of cycling within Australian cities. To this end, the current paper explores intra-urban differences in cycling across
the metropolitan areas of Adelaide and Melbourne. The research reported on in this paper is the first part of a much larger study into the factors which influence cycling, how these factors interact with each other and whether their degree of importance
varies in different localities. Existing research shows there are five headline variables which impact on who cycles and how often: urban context; cycling context; local government policies and
programs; culture of travel; and socio-economic and demographic characteristics.

The current research focuses on socio-economic and demographic characteristics and it involved mapping the journey-to-work by bicycle using Statistical Local Areas then testing the relationship between socio-economic and demographic variables
and levels of cycling. The results show a higher concentration of cycling in the central city and inner suburbs but this pattern is not straightforward especially when disaggregated by gender. The
spatial differences in cycling frequently reported at an international and inter-city scale are also evident at an intra-urban scale. Further, differences found across Adelaide and Melbourne are only partially accounted for by socio-economic and demographic variables leaving considerable room for contextual,
cultural and local area policies to explain the difference.