Tourist Motivation In Tourism

Understanding of people’s motivations for travelling and its association with destination choice play a crucial role in predicting future travel patterns and help tourism marketers develop more effective marketing strategies. Travel motivation is a major factor influencing tourist behaviour and is fundamental to tourism development. Previous researchers have developed some theories examining travel motivations. The most commonly known travel motivation theories include the career travel ladder (TCL) and travel career patterns (TCP) frameworks (Pearce, 2002, 2003), the optimal arousal model (Mannell, Iso-Ahola, 1987), and Plog’s allocentric/ psychocentric approach (Plog, 1974). An accepted and widely utilised theory, studying tourist motivations

Knowledge of people’s motivations can help tourism organisations improve their tourist services and reach customers more efficiently. But it should be noted that tourists are not homogenous, they have different images of their ideal holiday and different travel motivations (Kozak, 2002). To be more effective, researchers should further examine travel motivations according to market segmentation. Market segmentation is a powerful tool that aims at identifying distinct groups of people who have similar needs and desires (Kirdar, 1997). Segmenting the market is important because different segments of the tourism market require various distribution and marketing mix. Tourists can be segmented by many descriptive and explanatory variables. The widely used segmentation variables in tourism include geographic and demographic bases (Bennett, Strydom, 2001; Dolnicar, 2006; Goeldner, Ritchie, 2009). With regard to travel motivations, various empirical research studies have investigated that travel motivations differ among different market segments towards specific destinations (e.g. Pizam, Sussman, 1995; Baloglu, 1997; Acevedo, Nohara, 2004; Andreu et al., 2005; Jonsson, Devonish, 2008; Jensen, 2011). The most common segments being explored are geographic variables, e.g. country of origin and demographic variables such as age and gender. However,

In particular, the top-ranked motivations were selected for the analysis of motivational differences towards three specific segments: age, gender and region.

As mentioned above, many researchers have attempted to capture the underlying tourist motivations for travelling to various destinations. However, there is a lack of research done on travel motivations for visiting the UK towards market segmentation. This research tries to fill the knowledge gap by analysing the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ motivational factors and testing the relationships between the identified motives and specific geo-demographic variables. The findings of the study can contribute to the future research on travel motivations and help tourism organisations in the UK better understand tourist behaviour.

Research