Tourism Motivations and Decision-making

Motivations and decision-making are the building blocks of tourism demand. Accordingly, they were studied extensively over the years by tourism scholars. As a social and economic activity, tourism demand involves three components: voluntary, temporary, and mobility. The main segments within tourism are leisure travels, recreation, and holidays, which refers to more than fifty percent of all tourism activities. Additionally, tourism includes other segments such as business and professional travels, visiting friends and relatives, health tourism, and religious travels. In this chapter, intrinsic motivation is linked to push factors, while the element of free choice corresponds to decision-making and pull factors. The chapter tries to answer two big questions: why people travel and how they decide where, when and what to do while travelling. It also discusses the segment of non-traveller and their constraints. The conclusion presents current developments in the research of motivation and decision-making in the presence of the environmental crisis.