An Alternate Approach to Modeling the Slack Season Provision of Guided Tours to Tourists

We discuss an approach to modeling the slack season provision of guided tours to tourists that accounts for the twin phenomena of stochastic demand and tourist heterogeneity but is different from the way in which this problem has been modeled in the extant tourism literature. Our discussion uses the theory of discrete-time Markov chains and it models the slack season from a tourist demand perspective. Specifically, we first study a case in which the wait plus tour or the excursion time of an arriving tourist is exponentially distributed with a fixed mean. Next, we focus on a scenario in which the excursion time is exponentially distributed with one of two possible fixed means and these two means arise with specific probabilities