Abstract

This paper attempts to bring an economic underpinning to tourism research. It uses the
gravity model to derive an econometric model to explore the relationship between cultural
similarity and tourism demand, with special reference to Australia inbound tourism from 42
source countries. Since language and religion are thought to be the main exposition and
carrier of culture, we developed a continuous, normalized, and time variant index to capture
the similarity in language and religious profile between a source country and Australia. The
inclusion of these indexes in an empirical model yields OLS and quantile results that support
the belief that there is a close link between culture similarity and tourism demand.