What Drives People to Travel: Integrating the Tourist Motivation Paradigms

People's motivation to travel has long been discussed on a multidisciplinary basis characterized by three distinct motivation paradigms, namely, Plog's (1974 Plog, S. C. 1974. Why destination areas rise and fall in popularity. Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, 14(4): 55–58. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) “travel personality,” P. L. Pearce's (1988 Pearce, P. L. 1988. The Ulysses factor: Evaluating visitors in tourist settings, New York, NY: Springer-Verlag. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) “travel career ladder,” and Cohen's (1972 Cohen, E. 1972. Toward a sociology of international tourism. Social Research, 39(1): 164–182. [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) concept of “strangeness–familiarity.” This study uncovers the underlying consistence of these paradigms by proposing an integrated motivation framework and justifies it by applying this framework to tourist behavior research. This study concludes by arguing that a comprehensive perspective should be taken for conceiving a more accurate pattern or image of tourists, in the sense that tourist behavior patterns can be interpreted on an individual level by applying the travel personality, in a diachronic dimension by the travel career ladder, and from a holistic perspective by the concept of strangeness–familiarity.