engleski

Do values, personality and motivations influence tourist activities and lifestyle?

Tourism marketing literature focuses on the importance of psychographic characteristics for analysing traveller’ s behaviour. Psychographic characteristics are used to identify consumers’ psychological profile and, in particular, their values, beliefs, attitudes, interests, motivation, needs, opinions, activities, and daily life routines (Gladwell 1990). Psychographic characteristics allow for the development of tourists’ psychographic profiles (Menzes and Chandra 1989, Schewe and Calantone 1978, Shih 1986) and typologies (Solomon and George 1977, Wells 1975), distinction of modes of living or lifestyles (Mill and Morrison 1985) and differentiation between the travel market segments (Graham and Wall 1978, Schewe and Calantone 1978, Silverberg et al. 1997). In tourism, demographic characteristics such as age, gender and socio-economic characteristics, such as income or occupation, are commonly used to characterize consumers. However, demographic and socio-economic characteristics do not reveal the underlying travel motivations (Keng and Cheng 1999) and preferences. Thus, psychographic characteristics are employed to overcome the shortcomings of demographic and socio-economic characteristics. It is suggested that psychographics are more adequate than demographics in explaining consumer behaviour (Mayo 1975). For example, lifestyle information was found to be more useful than demographic variables in predicting travel behaviour (Woodside and Pitts 1976) and travellers’ tour preferences (Abbey 1979). Psychographics was also found to produce larger differences between groups of consumers than the standard demographic variables (Abbey 1979, Ryel and Grasse 1991) and thus it is concluded that psychographics should be used for market segmentation (Gladwell 1990). The use of psychographics in tourist behaviour research is increasing continuously. Many studies have been conducted over the past years on consumer psychographics in different contexts (Glyptis 1981, Holland et al. 1994, Howard 1976, Ingham 1986, Jackson 1982, Melamed 1977). The application of psychographics in tourism studies has been discussed by numerous authors trying to explain tourist behaviour and destination choice (Brayley 1993, Chon 1989, Fodness 1994, Gladwell 1990, Pitts and Woodside, 1986). Different theories and models using psychographics have been developed. For example, a VALS model developed by Shih (1986) used values, attitudes and lifestyle to assess whether personal values affected the selection of Pennsylvania as a holiday destination. The literature concluded that psychographics are multidimensional constructs and there is no one category that can be used to characterise and identify different types of tourists, and compare their psychological profiles. Thus several constructs should be used simultaneously in order to adequately examine consumers on psychological dimensions. In this study, five psychographic constructs are used to explain tourist behaviour, namely: values, personality, travel motivation, vacation activities and vacation lifestyle. These constructs are briefly discussed and hypotheses are developed in the literature review to emphasize previous work that has found or speculated on these relationships.

tourism, tourism destination, values, motivation, tourist activities

nije evidentirano