This study contributes to the long-distance travel modeling literature by providing an analysis of American households’ annual destination choices and time allocation patterns for long-distance leisure travel purposes. More specifically, an annual vacation destination choice and time allocation model is formulated to simultaneously predict the different destinations that a household visits in a year, and the time it allocates to each of the visited destinations. The model takes the form of a Multiple Discrete-Continuous Extreme Value (MDCEV) structure. Further, the paper proposes a variant of the MDCEV model that avoids the prediction of unrealistically small amounts of time allocation to the chosen alternatives. To do so, the continuously non-linear utility functional form in the MDCEV framework is replaced with a combination of a linear and non-linear form.

The empirical data for this analysis comes from the 1995 American Travel Survey Data, with the U.S. divided into 210 alternative destinations. The empirical analysis provides important insights into the determinants of households’ vacation destination choice and time allocation patterns. The proposed variant of the MDCEV model  reduces the likelihood of destination choices with unrealistically small amounts of time allocation. The annual vacation destination choice models developed in this study can be incorporated into a larger national travel modeling framework for predicting the national-level, origin-destination flows for vacation travel.