Tourism market segmentation of Italian families for the summer season

In last decades, the rapid expansion of tourism sector and the major differentiation of the tourism products have stimulated several studies in segmentation of tourism markets; but the applications of that technique has always focused on single consumers, while often the real "buyer" is the family. In this paper, we deal with national leisure tourism of Italian families in summer season; for the analysis, a sample of around 3,500 Italian families from a multi-scope sample survey "Travels and Holidays", collected by the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) is used. The major objective of this study is to investigate holiday strategies of Italian families in connection with recent changes in family structure, in order to individuate different profiles and different customs in travel patterns.