Questionnaire: Holidays

Authors: Clémence BOUTIN and Muriel BREIGEAT

Which type of holiday for Agrocampus Ouest students?

The aim of this analysis is to build a typology of 100 Agrocampus Ouest students as regards their vacations.
Afterwards, thanks to some questions to a student, we would like to identify the cluster this student belongs to. As a consequence, we will be able to direct the student towards the type of vacations that suits him.
To make a typology of the student’s holidays, we realized a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) and then a Hierarchical Clustering on Principal Components (HCPC) to establish different classes of people.

The first four dimensions of the MCA sum up 25.96% of the variability knowing that we have 123 modalities as regards active variables:

  • The first axis qualifies the frequency of trips; it opposes people who often travel and people who do not
  • The second axis differentiates students according to their holiday way of life (accommodation, activities and period) and to their financial resources (parents, job)
  • The third axis divides students who indulge themselves in sports and comfortable accommodation for a short period and students who go away for a long time favouring cheap accommodation
  • The fourth axis differentiates students who want to discover (go alone to a big city far away) and students who spend time on their computer and watch tv

With those axes to differentiate peoples, we made different clusters, here they are

  • The first cluster is composed of students who do not go on holiday or just once. If they go, they participate in an organized trip for the young people to practice winter sports. They work during their holiday
  • Another cluster is made of quite wealthy people. They are financed by their parents, they favour comfort and culture. However "vacations" are synonymous of "spending" for them. The only thing they miss is going to amusement parks. They go away thanks to travel agencies but not in their area
  • The third cluster concentrates social people (like being rounded, participate in trips organized for the young). They go away three times a year at seaside and/or in campsites for short periods. They work during their holidays because their parents only finance half of their trips
  • The last students go away very frequently, out of the high season. They are satisfied with staying in detached houses

We highlighted four kinds of vacationers; each cluster has different confines and wishes. We are now able to identify a student coming in our "Agrocampus Travel Agency" thanks to his answers to questions about fundamental characteristics of clusters (finance, frequency of trips…). We are able to find ideal vacations for him.
Nevertheless, the image of vacations is not linked to the kind of holiday-maker. Whatever cluster an Agrocampus student belongs to, he has the same image of holiday than the others.

Find here the data set and the R script:

The results of the ENMCA() function are the following:

Beware the results of HCPC() and ENMCA() are not quite the same since the data are ventilated and the method of classification is a bit different.