Tourism in the new golden age: an application of twostep cluster analysis to French residents’ interest in Norwegian nature-based tourism

There are a plethora of segmentation studies within the tourism marketing literature that profile tourists to international destinations. Authors of these studies emphasise segmenting tourists to an international destination/s through applying either factor analysis and/or traditional cluster analysis methods. Despite the usefulness of these methods, researchers usually focus on one variable (e.g. motivations) to classify their tourists into segments and then apply subsequent statistical mechanisms to differentiate between these segments. As several tourism marketers argue that equal emphasis should be placed on market segmentation bases and variables when analysing data, this frequently used process presents data analysis limitations. A total of 2010 French residents who exhibited an interest in nature-based holidays and touring Norway are collected through an online survey and then segmented using TwoStep cluster analysis. Three valid segments are developed which lends support to this data analysis method for classifying tourists to an international destination in the new golden age of tourism. Recommendations as a result of the findings are made for product development and marketing communication, while future research opportunities are also outlined