Do consumers’ preferences change when on vacation? A willingness to pay study on apples and honey

Ways of increasing the market for local produce beyond the local residents within the local community, could include the following two potential solutions: 1) an expansion out to a more national/global market, which though would be costly in terms of transportation costs or 2) getting national/global consumers into the local market, e.g. as tourists. The objective of the present paper is to investigate the tourism's potential in the promotion of locally produced food products, within the perspective of context dependency and consumers' preferences for local produce. Firstly, people are asked to state their preferences for locally produced apples and honey, respectively. Secondly, we illustrate how preferences towards local produce depend on the situation, in which the consumers are placed. Applying a CE we find that for honey, the consumers' willingness to pay for local produce displays a considerable variation across respondents, suggesting that there could be a potential segmentation of respondents and their willingness to pay, which could imply the market to be highly niched. This is further investigated by applying a discrete mixture model. The findings from the DM model suggests that the market for the two characteristics local and Danish produce in both honey and apples and within both a daily and a holiday context is segmented into two groups - one group (2/3) who do not have particular high preferences towards neither Danish nor local produce and another group (1/3), who do have rather large preferences for both characteristics.