Quantification of the Tourism Potential: accounting a component of the territorial wealth

Abstract

The Tourism Potential understood as a quantitative indicator of the maximum number of visitors that can attract a place of interest in a given time, supports decision making in various fields of territorial development. In this context, this work proposes amethod to quantify the Tourism Potential at Termas del Plomo y Glaciar el Morado, two sites located in Los Andes Mountains, close to Santiago de Chile. To achieve this purpose, the Tourist Potential was modeled as a function of some variables related to aspects such as: accessibility, advertising, services, population and climate restrictions. Since no data were available about visits to both sites, it was used as proxy, others five mountain ous sites where records did exist. Indeed, because all of them are under the state administration, they have data deal with the number of visits as a dependent variable; and infrastructure, facilities,demography and other as independent variables. Through a Multiple Linear Regression wasable to discover the function that relates the number of visits to these explanatory variables, identifying advertising, travel costs and demographic attraction as the most relevant. The all these explanatory variables, the intervention is more plausible in travel costs, which reduced allow significantly increase the Tourist Potential, reaching 15406 visitors per year to glacier and 8846 visitors per year to baths. This preliminary work provides a quantitative and inexpensive tool for uncovering cryptic functions applicable to other similar places.