Information Provision to Tourists : A Stochastic Analysis

We study the provision of information to tourists in a probabilistic setting. Specifically, we provide answers to three hitherto unstudied questions in the tourism literature. We first delineate a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) model of a tourist information center (TIC) and then we compute the equilibrium distribution of the number of tourists present in this TIC. Next, we calculate the long run fraction of tourists with informational requests who join the queue in our TIC. Finally, we derive the long run average number of tourists served by our TIC staff member per unit time