Tourism Today - College of Tourism and Hotel Management

Festival visitor motivation segmentationThe event is one of the important strategies used by tourist destinations to attract visitors(Kotler, Bowen, and Makens, 2009) and event motivation can be used to better position tourismdestinations in visitors’ minds (Guerreiro, et al., 2011). Motivation is a driven force forhuman behaviors (Iso-Ahola, 1980). It functions as a force for people to act to satisfy theirneeds and wants because individuals have a need to satisfy the shortage when they feel a stateof deprivation (Leiper, 2004). By their distinct motivations, it will be an effective approachto design appropriate programs for participants and better differentiate festivals.Therefore, there are two objectives for this study. First, an attempt is made to document participants’motivations to an ethnical festival. Second, this study intends to examine whetherfestival motivations differ among groups of participants and if yes, who they are.LITERATURE REVIEWMotivation, the force to initiate, direct, and arouse human behaviors, would serve as one ofthe possible approaches to examine how human behaviors are generated (Iso-Ahola, 1980;Pearce, 1982). Specifically, three significant benefits would be derived from studies on motivations,including designing an appropriate product/service, enhancing customers’ satisfactionlevels, and gaining insight into customers’ decision making processes (Crompton andMcKay, 1997; Leiper, 2004).Behaviors in different domains are likely to be aroused by different needs. Illustrated byMayo and Jarvis, leisure travel is probably driven by the need for variety, escape from theboredom of consistency and tension, the unexpectedness, change and novelty (as cited in Rittichainuwat,Qu, and Mongkhonvanit, 2008). Because the festival is an alternative form oftourism, Getz (1991) justified that travel motivation theoretical frameworks could be utilizedin identifying participants’ festival motivations. Two theoretical frameworks have been utilizedin festival studies, i.e., the seeking and escaping theory (Iso-Ahola, 1982) and push andpull theory (Dann, 1977, 1981). Based on his leisure pursuit theory (Iso-Ahola, 1980, 1983),the seeking and escaping theory stated that people tend to escape from their stressful andboredom routines and seek the personal psychological rewards in sense of self-determinationand relaxation (Mannell and Iso-Ahola, 1987).The push and pull model (Dann, 1977) also attempts to use factors to explain human travelmotivation, where participants are motivated by push factor (e.g., psychological reward) andpull factor (e.g., festival attributes to stimulate intrinsic reward within push factor) (Scott,1996; Uysal, Li, and Sirakaya-Turk, 2008; Yoon and Uysal, 2005).As researchers were in pursuit of a universal festival or travel motivation model, it seemsthat it would not be a feasible approach due to the complex nature of human motivations(Harrial and Potts, 2002; Pearce, 1982). However, empirical studies have shown that mostmotivations found in various festival studies are identical and there would be some specificTourism Today - Fall 2012 - Full Paper35