Exploring the expenditure-based profile of Macao visitors: A cluster analysis

Visitor profiling has been increasingly recognized as an important tourism marketing tool in the advent of smart tourism. There is a substantial body of literature relating to tourism market segmentation and visitor profiles. However, most of them focus on psychographic and behavioral factors. Seldom research has addressed the visitor profile based on actual expenditure during the visit. In this study we explored the expenditure-based profile of Macao visitors using a randomly sampled dataset from a large-scale visitor profile survey supported by Macao Government Tourist Office. Utilizing self-reported actual expenditure data from 3577 visitors, we extracted six expenditure clusters of Macao visitors using a k-means clustering with silhouette analysis. The six clusters, i.e., entertainment, gambling, cuisine, shopping, both cuisine & shopping, and transit, have significant differences in expenditure preferences and expenditure levels. We also analyzed the demographic and behavior profile for each cluster. Our findings shed light on developing customized marketing strategies to the profile of each distinct expenditure cluster of Macao visitors.