Travel experiences

Have you had a travel experience that affected you somehow Recount the experience as specifically as possible, using the five senses to detail it. 

Example This student wanted to write a paragraph about a travel experience. Of course it needs revision, but there are many good ideas upon which to build. 

It has already been established that the sin of homogenisation lurks within the field of tourist behaviour research (Galani-Moutafi, 1999). Tourists are not all the same, but it is usually inefficient when building the systematic study of a phenomenon to consider numerous individual cases in detail. It would, for example, be difficult if analysts endeavoured to document all of the variables of age, gender, nationality, economic well being, travel style, marital and family status, sexual preference, previous travel experience, attitudinal profiles and personality characteristics whenever they attempted to characterise a market. 

Age is both an observable and a universal demographic descriptor. It is frequently a substitute or proxy variable for physical fitness, activity levels, interests and previous travel experiences. 

A set of studies reporting the travel behaviour of professional and work groups is implicitly connected to two other frequently measured demographic descriptors previous travel experience and membership of special associations, interest groups or clubs. In particular measures of club membership as well as personal investment in products help define involvement and specialisation in many market segments (Woods, 2003). This specialisation topic will also be explored in the following section on tourist markets pertaining to particular tourist products. 

Pre-travel experience and commitment On-site style Post-experience outcomes Tourist classifications... 

The ideas of Maslow were only one contributor to the construction of the TCL. The career concept in leisure or tourism was equally important in shaping the TCL approach (Goffman, 1961 Hughes, 1937). In this line of inquiry, it is argued that people s motivation changes with their travel experience. People may be said to have a travel career, reflected in a pattern of travel motives, which changes according to their lifespan and/or accumulated travel experiences. 

Travel career A dynamic concept arguing that tourists have identifiable stages in their holiday taking. The state of one s travel career, like a career at work, is influenced by previous travel experiences and life-stage or contingency factors. A pattern of travel motives should be linked to or characterise the state of one s travel career. (Empirical studies are useful to explore these links.) Travel careers can be operationalised by a conjoint consideration of travel experience, age and life cycle. 

The research approached travel motivation through a two-phased process - exploratory interviews and a major survey study. The interview phase of the study is reported in detail in Lee and Pearce (2002). Intensive interviews with a small number of travellers chosen because of their markedly different travel experience and life-cycle phases were conducted. The small sample consisted of Australian-based residents. 

The sample consisted of 1012 respondents of whom just over half (57%) were Australian, 22% were from United Kingdom and the rest (21%) were from other Western countries. The percentage of male (47%) and female (53%) respondents was quite closely balanced. Slightly more than half (53%) were relatively younger respondents under 36 years of age. Nearly one quarter (23%) of the sample held professional or technical positions and more than half (56%) had completed their tertiary education. For the respondents travel experience, nearly half (47%) were quite experienced in their domestic travel, indicating at least 26 separate travel events each while more than 53% had travelled overseas five times or more. 

Principal component analysis (PCA) was employed to identify the underlying motive dimensions. K-means cluster analysis was used to classify the respondents according to their travel experience levels. A number of checks on the importance of the items contributing to the travel experience levels were also conducted (Lee Pearce, 2002). The factor scores from the PCA analysis results were computed and independent t-tests were... 

One way to think about the factors obtained from the principal component analysis which are independent is to interpret them as defining a multi-dimensional space. For further analyses and in order to locate individuals within the 14-dimensional space, factor scores were calculated. First, the loading of each variable on a factor was multiplied by the individual s original value for that variable. In the next step of the procedure, the same calculation was repeated for all variables in the factor for that individual. These scores were then summed. The process was repeated for all factors for that same individual and then repeated for all other individuals. Finally, all scores were standardised to a mean of 0 with a standard deviation of 1. These procedures facilitate further statistical treatment of the motivational patterns and other variables of interest such as travel experience. 

The first study reported in this chapter made a modest attempt to consider life-cycle issues and travel experience variables. Since this effort illustrates and represents the developmental nature of conducting research it is included here for its demonstration value rather than as a definitive incorporation of life-cycle factors into travel motivation study. The second... 

Table 3.4 Cross-tabulation-profiles of travel experience level group...

Three basic variables - domestic travel experience, international travel experience and age - were taken into account in an initial attempt to characterise travel experience levels and to consider dimension of life-cycle and experience. A set of cluster analyses established that two distinct groups, an experienced and an inexperienced traveller group, were present in the sample. These groups also differed on a range of other demographic variables. These differences are reported in Table 3.4. 

The links between the motivation factors and different levels of travel experience were explored with independent f-tests. The travel experience level was used as the independent variable, and motivation factors as the dependent variables (Table 3.5). 

Table 3.5 Independent f-test, motivation factors by travel experience level groups...

Motivation High travel experience level Low travel experience level t-s core Sig. 

Important contradictions to the original TCL theory were also obtained. It was found the travel experience group with less experience rated the self-actmlisation and self-development motives as more important. Indeed that group tended to rate most travel motivational factors as more important. Seven out of the nine motivational factors, which were identified to be significantly different in importance, were emphasised more by the people with less travel experience. This finding was consistent with the qualitative results. 

The three most important motivational factors identified in the quantitative results were novelty, escape/relax, and relationship. These factors showed no significant difference in their importance between the two levels of travel experience. Similarly, the interview results also suggested that these three factors, along with self-development, are the main psychological forces driving travel. A preliminary statement on the structure of travel motivation is possible here. There is a strong likelihood that people may have certain dominant and constant travel motivations that act as a common backbone to travel regardless of their travel experience level. In particular,... 

From this first study several achievements can be noted. An extensive list of travel motivation items, which provided a broad coverage of possible motives of travel, was employed. Motivation factors were effectively and clearly identified. Many of the motives were shown to be influenced by the levels of travel experience. Furthermore, the identification of four important motivation factors that persisted through two contrasting levels of experience led to the theoretical possibility that there is a mainframe or backbone in the travel career patterns. 

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