Journal of the Geographical Institute "Jovan Cvijic", SASA 2020 Volume 70, Issue 1, Pages: 31-43
https://doi.org/10.2298/IJGI2001031P
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Factors affecting conference participation decision-making
Pavluković Vanja (University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Sciences, Department of Geography, Tourism and Hotel Management, Novi Sad, Serbia)
Cimbaljević Marija (University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Sciences, Department of Geography, Tourism and Hotel Management, Novi Sad, Serbia)
Business travel, as the sector with the fastest growth in the tourism
industry globally, has received increased attention from both countries and
cities, particularly from emerging destinations. In developing economies,
business travel, including attending meetings, conferences, incentives and
other business events, often plays a leading role in the growth of the wider
travel and tourism sector. Therefore, tourism authorities and convention
bureaus at the national and city levels have been struggling to attract
international conferences and a larger number of participants to
conferences. Understanding factors, which appear to be important in the
conference participation decision-making process, can help conference
organizers and destinations to attract more participants and thus gain more
benefit from this growing sector of the tourism industry. Therefore, this
study aims to examine factors affecting the conference participation
decision-making from the academics' perspective. Furthermore, it
investigates how different socio-demographic characteristics of the
respondents influence the extracted factors of the conference participation
decision-making process. The data was collected from the academics employed
at the University of Novi Sad in Serbia. The findings reveal six dimensions
of conference participation decision-making: destination stimuli, costs and
destination accessibility, educational and professional opportunities,
intervening opportunities, location factors, and conference factors. The
results also show that there are statistically significant differences in
some extracted factors between respondents of different gender, age,
education level, and academic position, while the frequency of participation
in international conferences does not influence the factors. The results
could be of interest to all stakeholders in the business travel and tourism
industry.
Keywords: conference participation, decision-making, academic conference, meeting industry, business traveland tourism