Identification and Analysis of Foreign Tourists Motivations for Travelling to Isfahan

Extended abstract1-IntroductionTourism is one of the important issues in global economic and an important source of foreign exchange earning for developed and developing countries. Nowadays, tourism industry has attracted considerable amount of planning efforts and investments. Tourism development depends on several factors such as transportation, living standards, tourism industrialization, and identification and satisfaction of tourist’s needs, and wants. The success of a tourist destination not only depends on qualifications of the destination, but also proper planning for attracting tourists and introducing destination and its facilities to target markets is necessary. Understanding tourists’ travel motives is one of the basic assumptions for tourism market segmenting and planning. The goal of tourist market segmentation is to provide proper services for each group of tourists. According to previous studies, studying the relation of tourists’ demographical variables with their travel motives is also very important.2-Theoretical background In discussing tourism issues, the first question that comes to the mind of tourism planners, researchers, experts, and policy makers is that why people travel? What are the destinations selected? And what are the motives and reasons for selecting specific destination? Studying travel motives is an important issue, because it helps tourism planners and policy makers to understand which destination is proper for a specific tourists group and what specification should a specific destination have to attract tourists. Travel motives may include leisure, the level of expenses, shopping opportunity, adventure, handicrafts, visiting ancient and historical places, learning about new culture and trade.3- DiscussionExploratory factor analysis is a technique used for exploring dimensions of a phenomenon and used to decrease the items of its measurement scale. Factor analysis technique has been used to identify the travel motives of tourists who visited Isfahan. After performing a pilot study, a number of 200 foreign tourists have been selected in a convenient sampling method. For the purpose of the study a self-administered questionnaire has been provided to the respondent. After applying the principal components analysis technique and Equamax Rotation Technique to the surveyed data, six principal motives for traveling to Iran have been identified. It is should noticed that for higher accuracy, the elements with factor loading of less than 0.5 have been eliminated. According to the results of exploratory factor analysis, five i