Travel motivation-based typology of tourists who visit a shopping festival

Abstract

Shopping festivals are being promoted as tourism products thus attracting large number of tourists who are heterogeneous in their travel motives. Knowledge about tourists’ travel motives would enable destination marketers in meeting their needs. The purpose of this study is to understand the travel motives of tourists who visit the Dubai Shopping Festival and develop a tourist typology based on their motives. Principal component factor analysis was used to identify the motivating factors, following which a cluster analysis was done to classify the tourists into three segments, namely relaxers, multi-motivated seekers and shoppers. Further, Discriminant Analysis was used to identify factors which differentiated the clusters. Theoretical and practical implications of the study are presented.