A Conceptual and Methodological Framework of Leisure Activity Loyalty Accommodating the Travel Context

As leisure travel continues to grow, it has become a critical subject for planners and decisionmakers since it significantly impacts regional economic and social development as well as contributes to emission levels and congestion. Despite being a significant percentage of our travel, however, leisure travel behavior is still not very well understood. The goal of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of leisure activity participation by considering leisure activity loyalty within the travel context. In particular, this study focuses on one specific dimension of travel context: travel extent (i.e. whether an individual participates in a leisure activity on a daily versus a long-distance basis). As such, this paper first introduces a unified conceptual framework for measuring leisure activity loyalties within a travel context, based on two distinct dynamics of leisure loyalty behavior - destination attachment and activity involvement. Additionally, this paper uses a unique 2001 NHTS dataset comprised of households’ daily and long-distance leisure activities to undertake a unique empirical analysis of five distinct leisure activities using the conceptual framework and a copula-based model methodology. The findings confirmed that households demonstrate significant loyalties to travel contexts across all leisure activities, especially resting and sightseeing.