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revenues in Spain and other European countries, and to support substitution effects between countries as a result of the tourists’ goal of minimizing the risk of facing a terror attack. This result was also found by Drakos and Kutan (2003), while (Pizam, 1999) and (Krakover, 2005) show that both the severity and the frequency of the terror events are negatively correlated with tourism demand. In another study, Pizam and Fleischer (2002) confirmed for Israel the hypothesis that the frequency of terror acts caused a larger decline in demand than the severity of those visits. More recently, Coshall employs an “intervention analysis” to explore the dynamics of the impact of terrorism events on those visiting United Kingdom and UK tourists going abroad. He found that “the expenditure was robust to such events in the 80s, rapidly returning to the norm after the crisis” (2005:592).
An interesting path of research in estimating the effect of terrorism events on the tourism industry has followed the work of Krakover (2005). This author proposed an index that collects the level of terrorist activity in a specific period of time. Thus, a zero represents a period with no terror event and a 9 a period with the maximum level of terror activity. A relevant application can be found in Fleischer and Buccola, who employ Krakover’s index in order to estimate the effect of terrorism events on the demand and supply of the Israeli hotel sector. They find that “the severer the war of terror climate, the lower the international visitor demand” (2002:1339). More particularly, they found that “tourists last an average of two months in reacting to increases in terrorist attacks, while over a longer period, an event’s psychological effect appears to subside” (2002:1339).
Although Krakover’s index has been successfully applied in previous research, its validity crucially depends on the existence of a relatively constant flow of terror events. Therefore, its utility is high for applications like those studied in Pizam and Fleischer (2002) or Fleischer and Buccola (2002). However, in the context of this research, the fact that the magnitude of the terror event was never seen before in modern history does not recommend its use.
Nevertheless, previous research has focused on estimating the aggregate effects of terrorism events on the industry (by using time series analysis or structural equation models to forecast the reduction in the total number of trips, tourists’ expenditure, and so on), and have provided little evidence on the impact of terror events on micro-tourist preferences (using individual tourist data rather than aggregated or time series data). Since the ultimate goal of this line of research is to assist the industry and government agencies to learn form past experiences and to develop strategies for coping with similar events in the future, an extensive group of researchers have claimed the importance of introducing basic decisionmaking approaches in order to fully understand international tourists’ responses to traumatic events (Weimann and Winn 1994; Yechiam, Barron and Erev 2005).
This paper may indeed be the first to adopt a discrete choice approach to the study of the impact of terrorism on tourism demand and tourist preferences for alternative destinations and product attributes. The most important advantage of using a discrete choice approach in this context is that it allows researchers to disentangle the effect of traumatic events o