Identifying the Relationship between Travel Motivation and Lifestyles among Malaysian Pleasure Tourists and Its Marketing Implications

Abstract

This preliminary study attempts to profile the Malaysian domestic pleasure travel market based on lifestyles and travel motives as well as the relationship between the two constructs. This study also investigates the sources of information and other travel-related characteristics in the Malaysian pleasure travel marketplace. This study involves a questionnaire-survey of 248 respondents and employed factor analyses with varimax rotation as the main statistical method. Factor analysis of 50 travel motivation items selected from previous literature reveals that there are five major forms of pleasure-motivated travel, namely, Nature, Cultural, Budget, Adventure and Freedom. Nature-motivated travel emerges as the most popular type among local tourists. This may be due to the country being rich in natural attractions. Thus, this study recommends further development of the ecotourism sector to encourage more Malaysians to spend their vacation locally. Five types of lifestyle were extracted from the factor analysis of 34 AIO statements adopted from Hawes (1988). The five factors labelled as the Satisfiers, the Dreamers, the Indoors, the Achievers and the Escapist. The Satisfiers and the Dreamers are the two most dominant types of lifestyle. Generally, domestic tourists are satisfied with their present leisure activities as well as possessing high curiosity for travelling to novel tourist destinations. At the same time, the Pearson Product-moment Correlation analysis was employed to investigate the relationships between the travel motivations and lifestyle dimension. The results show that the Dreamers have significant relationships with all five forms of travel motives. The study's findings will assist tourism industry players in developing tourist destinations based on these underlying travel motivations and lifestyles, thus segmenting and differentiating one destination from another for further success in promoting the destinations.