Tourist Motivation

People travel for many different reasons. Reasons that motivate people to travel have been investigated by many researchers. According to Moutinho (1987) tourist’s vacation motivation is determined by social factors and is based on tourist’s expectations. Tourists can be seen as searchers, motivated by desire to discover of oneself and psychological mobility.

Different classifications have been made for travel motivators. Usually they are divided on general - reasons, people are often not fully aware of; and specific - related to images based on personal past experience, knowledge, friends’ advice, information from mass-media, advertisements and travel intermediaries, cost, time available, age, health, family obligations, etc.

In the tourism industry we divide the reasons for travel into three main categories: leisure tourism, business tourism, and visiting friends and relatives (usually abbreviated to VFR).

Leisure tourism cam mean anything from excursions, day trips, and weekend breaks to package holidays, pleasure cruises, and longer independent trips such as hill walking or treks in the mountains. It also includes cultural trips (for example, to music festivals), educational trips (for example, study tours), and religious trips (for example, pilgrims on a walking tour to a holy place).

Business tourism includes any travel away from one’s main place of residence, for such events as meetings, conferences, and trade fairs. It also includes special trips when workers are given a reward or a ‘thank you’ for good work (this is known as an incentive tour).

Travel in order to visit friends or family relatives is also regarded as part of the tourism industry. This could be for a special family party, such as a reunion or a wedding, or a regular trip made every year.

Some researchers identify the following categories of general motivators: educational and cultural (to see how people in other countries live and work; to see particular sights, monuments and works of art; to gain a better understanding of current events, and to attend special culture or artistic events), relaxation, adventure and pleasure (to get away from everyday routine and obligations, to see new places, people or gain new experiences, to have good time, fun, and to have some sort of romantic sexual experience), health and recreation (to have a rest and recover of work and strain and to practice sport and exercise), ethic and family (to visit place your family is from, to visit relatives and friends, and to spend time with family and children), and social and «competitive» (to be able to talk about places visited because it is «fashionable» and to show that one can afford it). Lately, McIntosh (1984, cited in Moutinho, 1987) will classify the travel motivators into physical (rest, recreation, sport, health), cultural, interpersonal (meeting new people, friends, relatives, getting away from routine life), status and prestige motivators that are self-esteem and respect.

Each destination offers a variety of products and services to attract tourists. From the destinations’ point of view, it is very important to know why tourists choose (or not choose) this destination and how the tourists feel about the place they visited. Analysis of tourist motivation attempts to extend the theoretical and empirical evidence on the causal relationship among the push and pull motivations, satisfaction, and destination loyalty.

Motivation has been referred to as psychological/biological/social needs and wants, including internal (or emotional) and external forces, these forces describe how individuals are pushed by motivation variables into making travel decisions and how they are pulled or attracted by destination attributes.

“Push” factors are defined as origin-related and refer the intangible, intrinsic desires of the individual traveler, such as desire to escape, rest and relaxation, adventure, health and prestige.

“Pull” factors are defined mainly related to the attractiveness of a given destination and tangible characteristics such as beaches, accommodation and recreation facilities and cultural and historical resources. Quite a number of literatures have studied tourist motivation from biological, psychological, sociological and anthropological aspects.

Tourism motivation is a multi-motive dimensional. Tourists often have more than one motive for choosing a certain destination, for example, people can choose one destination with a motive of relaxation in a pleasant safe place combined with visiting a local historical heritage. Motivation is also a dynamic and flexible variable. The design of a motivation list ‘must be flexible enough to incorporate individual changes across the life-span and consider the effects of broad cultural force on tourist motivation’. For example, a person may change his travel preferences as he moves through the family life cycle from a single-career person to a more family-oriented person, his motives for choosing destinations may be changed accordingly.

Task 4. Look through the text and find the English equivalents for: