Elucidating the Impact of Visa Regimes : A Decision Tree Analysis
Facilitating mobility is important for creating tourism demand and is legislated by the visa policies of nations. Most countries implement visa regulations aimed at homeland security which also deter genuine travelers hindering domestic economy by means of tourism, trade, science and knowledge exchange. Turkey, on the other hand, has been implementing liberal visa policies in recent decades in order to boost the number of visiting travelers and thereby support tourism. In this paper, we used a decision tree approach to decipher the hampering impact of restrictive visa regimes on tourism demand, employing the inbound tourism data from eighty-four countries to Turkey in the period of 2000-13. We discovered the predictors that have the strongest impact on tourism demand using the Chi-square Automatic Interaction Detector (CHAID), Exhaustive-CHAID, Classification and Regression Trees, and Random Tree algorithms, and found that visa restrictions are as prognostic via the information fusion based sensitivity analysis. We recommend policy-makers describing liberal visa policies to the greatest extent in view of immigration issues and security threats they pose in order to improve the mobility across nations