The purpose of this study is to implement an innovative approach to analyze children’s impact on family decisions. Furthermore, a new strategy to collect children’s preferences is shown to reduce the lack of children’s voices in the tourism literature.
A stated preference (SP) experiment with a two-step procedure is applied: in the first step, children’s preferences are collected through pictures and a rating scale based on emoticons; in the second step, the SP is submitted to their parents to understand how children influence decisions. Parents faced six choice tasks, each of them showing three different activities that they could evaluate on the basis of three attributes: the cost of the activity, the distance from the place of interview and children’s degree of satisfaction in participating in the activity.
The majority of children interviewed show a high preference for swimming pool/lido, and their preference is highly taken into account by parents. Parents prefer closer and cheaper activities, but children’s preferences play a fundamental role in the final choice. In addition, parents are willing to pay an extra 100 CHF, for the whole family, to choose an activity that fulfills children’s preferences, rather than an activity that children do not like.
The originality contribution of this paper consists of using an innovative procedure to collect children’s preferences and combine them in an SP experiment submitted to their parents. Children’s influence on decisions is also measured by parent’s willingness to pay to satisfy their preferences.
