The travel decisions pushing and pulling visitors to Melbourne

A Federation researcher has developed a model to identify the pre-trip motivations behind travel decisions and destination choices that overseas visitors make before visiting Melbourne.

Dr Daria Soldatenko compared the travel motivations of tourists from China to those from other countries for the study that has been pubished in the International Journal of Tourism Cities. Before COVID lockdowns, China held the top spot on the list of countries whose citizens visited Australia but fell to sixth place after lifting travel restrictions earlier this year.

She hopes the study will help destination marketing organisations wanting to develop customised tourist products, services, and promotional programs.

"To provide travellers with competitive and desirable products and services, destination marketers and tourism providers need to understand the attributes of visitors from each major market, as well as their travel decision-making and destination-choice processes," Dr Soldatenko said. "Then we can endeavour to meet those needs."

For the PhD project, Dr Soldatenko developed a complex push-pull theory model to look at tourists' pre-trip motivations. In tourism, push factors encourage people to travel and pull factors motivate people to visit a particular destination.

She says the extended push-pull model gives a comprehensive understanding of how people make travel decisions, taking into account factors like why people want to travel, what they look for in a destination, how they get information, what they expect from the trip, what might hold them back, and how they evaluate their destination choices. Understanding these factors can be used to attract and keep visitors at tourist destinations, Dr Soldatenko says.

The pre-trip motivational model was developed and tested on a sample of 320 tourists from China and other countries. The primary data for the research were collected just before the COVID-19 pandemic started in early 2020, and the study also drew from official data from the same period to form an appropriate data set for context. The results and findings pre-date the significant impacts on travel behaviour from the pandemic.

To collect data, Dr Soldatenko engaged with the tourists in person at tourism hotspots in the city, in lounges of hostels and those travelling on tourist buses - before and after visiting locations and through social media channels.

She says the findings show that for both groups, knowledge, novelty and pleasure were the most important motivations and nature and climate were the most important elements of destination attributes. The survey revealed significant differences between the samples' push and pull factors.

"Chinese visitors to Melbourne assigned higher importance to rest and relaxing opportunities, family-oriented activities, as well as safety and a high level of service," Dr Soldatenko said. They prioritised ease of travel and being comfortable - this is a strong focus because it hasn't been easy to travel abroad, and there are issues getting travel visas."

Tourists from other countries were more interested in having new and more adventurous activities.

"For Melbourne as a tourist destination, promotion campaigns for non-Chinese markets should focus on nature-based experiences, cultural attractions, and the city's exciting atmosphere, while for the Chinese market, emphasis should be placed on nature-based experiences, resting and relaxing opportunities, family-oriented activities, cultural attractions, as well as safety and high level of service."

"It is significant to examine the constructs in the proposed tourists' pre-trip motivational model, but in addition, it is more important to analyse and compare separate source markets based on cultural background or nationality to tailor tourist products and advertising campaigns to each market."

She says Chinese tourists typically have much shorter annual leave than other tourists, which had potential implications for tourism development in regional Victoria as these tourists would often stay in big cities and spend just one day at easy-to-reach locations if time permitted.

Dr Soldatenko’s supervisor Professor Elisa Zentveld says research plays an important role in guiding the industry by providing detailed information to tourism industries.

“Understanding the different aspects that motivate people to engage in tourist experiences, and the different experiences being sought by different types of tourists can be valuable to tourism industries to better direct their marketing dollars.”

Dr Soldatenko says the research is timely as the tourism sector was yet to fully recover from the COVID lockdowns, and more time is needed for the tourism sector to return to full capacity. She says the pre-trip motivational model for tourists can guide further research in this area, and there is scope to use the model in other sectors.

"The study is designed to advance both tourist behaviour research and tourism decision-making literature and add depth to the understanding of visitor motivational factors that affect travel decision-making processes," Dr Soldatenko said. "But this pre-trip motivational model can be easily modified and applied to other behaviour and motivational studies beyond the tourism sector."

Related reading:

Kick-starting tourism in a post-COVID world