The role of landscape preferences in the travel decisions of railway passengers: Evidence from Hungary

When surveying the motivation side of travel and tourism, we can state that tourists consider in their travel decisions, certain landscape preferences – to a certain extent. It also seems to be evident, however, that the objective evaluation of a landscape is a hard task for researchers for numerous reasons. In recent decades, several attempts have been made to create such methods but it seems that, in Hungary at least, this topic is rather neglected. The aim of this study is to provide an evaluation method for the landscape preferences of passengers travelling on Hungarian railway lines, demonstrating how the landscape around the railways could become an attraction during the travel. We survey what types of landscape appearance would be needed in order to generate travel decisions for tourists and also how the travel experience itself could become a tourism product.