Thermal Comfort and Consumer Behavior: Visitor Attendance Response at Select Metropolitan Zoos

Weather impacts people's lives on a daily basis. Decisions involving outdoor activities require people to understand and interpret the weather. One sector of the economy that is particularly vulnerable to changing weather conditions is tourism, recreation, and leisure (TRL).

This paper studies the impacts of day-to-day weather on one element of the TRL sector by analyzing daily visitor attendances at four large metropolitan zoos in the United States. Daily attendances at each zoo were paired with a biometeorologically-derived temperature index in order to analyze how daily visitor attendance at each zoo was shaped by visitor comfort levels in an outdoor urban setting. We utilized Hoppe's Physiologically Equivalent Temperature (PET) which quantifies human heat balance into a temperature and is one of the most commonly applied biometeorological indexes. PET's application is then advanced with thermal categorical classification by incorporating the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers' (ASHRAE) international nine-point thermal sensation scale. This scale is further specified with the use of Hwang's Taiwan baseline and the European baseline as defined by Matzarakis.

Findings display the need for differing geographic and cultural expectations when analyzing the relationships that exist between zoo attendance rates and the weather. A general weather preference for outdoor tourism, recreation, and leisure does exist, but businesses must take regional weather preferences into account when forecasting future visitor demand patterns. Businesses must also consider specific socio-cultural differences and tolerances to best understand the relationships between attendance and weather. The findings substantiate the need for more advanced, scientifically-grounded theory when studying weather's impacts on human behavior.