Travel motivation: Literature review and research agenda

Abstract

Although travel motivation is one of the most researched areas in the tourism field, it is difficult to study. Indeed, travel motivation is multi-faceted and dynamic (Crompton & McKay, 1997) and there is no single feature of travel motivation. Tourists tend to travel with various motives, even within a single journey. This leads to challenges for researchers to examine travel motivation. The present paper is to review an extensive number of travel motivation studies and to deepen our understanding of the past, current, and future state of the concept of travel motivation. The existing travel motivation studies were collected from the Web of Science of Thomson Reuters (WoS), with two specific keywords, “travel motivation” and “tourism.” After eliminating the irrelevant entries, a total of 121 articles from 40 journals were analysed with the use of content analysis. Based on the results of content analysis, four major themes were identified: (a) research area and context; (b) methodological approach; (c) the application of motivation theory; and (d) operationalisation of travel motivation. Research gaps and opportunities for future research on travel motivation are recommended.