Study On Relationships Of Travel Experience, Travel Motivation And Behavioral Intention

The purpose of the study lies in discussing the relationships among travel experience, travel motivation and behavioral Intention. Travel motivation is the driving force which affects tourists’travel behavior. With the current market more and more competitive, the key to succeed is improving the comprehensive competitiveness. To improve the competitiveness, it is very important to comprehend both the travel motivation and characteristics of tourists for the boom development of tourism. While the travel experience increases, travel motivations may change. Therefore, the relationships between travel experience and travel motivation are what the paper chooses to research. In addition, the intention to re-visit and the recommendation intention are both important for the boom of tourism. Therefore, the paper chooses to use the concept of behavioral intention, including both the intention of revisiting and recommendation intention, to discuss the relationships between travel motivation and behavioral Intention.The research was carried out through two studies. On one hand, there is a theoretical research to direct the further scale of travel motivation and travel experience. On the other hand, there is a questionnaire survey to further explore the ideas.The exploration of the components of travel motivation based on the theory of travel career ladder and a literature review is the main contribution of the paper. For purpose of the exploration of the travel motivation scale, the paper carried out exploratory factor analysis. The item was deleted if the factor loadings were less than0.5. Furthermore, a CITC test was also conducted in the paper. Prior to examining the relationships between travel motivation and travel experiences, the paper developed a travel experience scale to measure tourists’ travel experience level. In order to measure travel experience level, three variables, self-service travel experience, half-self-service travel experience and package tour experience were taken into account. Then the paper will examine which travel motivation factors are affected by different levels of travel experience.Overall results suggest that four dimensions comprise the central backbone of travel motivation. They are self-development and self-actualization motivation, esteem motivation, culture-related motivation (such as experiencing different cultures), nature-related motivation (such as being close to nature).Only self-development and self-actualization motivation had a higher priority for more experienced tourists, while motivations such as culture-related motivation、 nature-related motivation and esteem motivation had nothing to do with the level of experience. Through ANOVA, independent T-test and optimal scaling regression, it turned out to be that only income and education level have significant effects on some dimensions of travel motivation, whereas gender, age and marital status had nothing to do with travel motivation. Compared with the ones who belonged to low-level education, the ones with high level of education also record slightly more self-development and self-actualization motivations.