How different are tourists who decide to travel to a mature destination because of the existence of a low-cost carrier route?

•The paper analyses the role of an LCC route in the choice of a tourist destination.•Two groups of passengers are identified according to the LCC availability.•The two groups are “low-cost loyal tourists” and “destination loyal tourists”.•The analysis is based in the Causal Chain Approach probabilistic methodology.•The method sheds new light on traveller choices to destinations.

There seems little doubt that Low-Cost Carriers (LCCs) have had a substantial impact on the tourism sector, with the generation of volumes of tourists to emerging and mature destinations. However, little is known about how the tourists' profile depends on the influence exercised by an LCC in the decision-making process for visiting a certain destination. This is the focus of this study which main aim is to identify and understand two types of travellers: travellers who visited the destination mainly due to the availability of low-cost flights, and travellers who declare they would have visited the destination anyway using different means. Methodologically, we adopt the Causal Chain Approach to measure the causation link between the availability of low-cost flight routes and tourists' decisions to visit a certain destination. Our empirical case study examines the profile of travellers using a Ryanair route from East Midlands airport (England) to Reus airport (Catalonia).