Non-routine travel in multi-day trip diary data

This study addresses the need for more knowledge in long-distance travel behaviour by developing a method to identify non-routine travel behaviour in multi-day travel surveys. Following the definition of tourism, this study uses trip diary data to approximate an individual’s usual environment and identify travel events leaving this usual environment as non-routine travel. In contrast to commonly used definitions of long-distance travel, e.g. based on a distance criterion, this study provides an approach that identifies non-routine travel on an individual level depending on the reported behaviour. After calculating and comparing ten indicators to measure the size of the usual environment based on tour distances reported in three weeks, one indicator considering the interquartile range is selected. A following analysis shows that the developed approach performs equally sufficient if only two weeks of trip diaries are available. Findings reveal that, on average, about 9% of all reported tours of a sample from a large-scale German household travel survey are non-routine travel.