RELATIONS OF TOURIST PUSH AND PULL MOTIVATIONS WITH THEIR ACTIVITIES: THE CASE OF LITHUANIA

摘要

Tourist motivatie^ns are typically grouped into push and pull categories, and this classification is helpfulfor numerous analytical purposes. The objective of this study is to analyze how push and pull motivations are related with tourist activities in a destination country. Typically, pull motivations triggertourist involvement in activities that are closely related with these motivations (like culture-relatedmotivations with culture-related activities; nature-related motivation with nature-related activities,etc.). However, this is much less obvious in case of push motivations, since there arc few activitiesthat could he directly linked with the latter. The identified research gap needs to be explored. Possible tourist activities in a visited country are often rather typical; however, more specific preferencesare influenced by the specifics of a destination, travel programme concepts and other characteristicsof a particular trip. This makes the analysis of the relationship between motivations and activitiesrelevant to broad contexts, but also allows one to include specifics of an analysed country. The studyanalyses a relation of push and pull motivations with tourist activities in Lithuania on the basis of atourist survey that includes 374 respondents from 47 countries. The analysis is concentrated on linkingfour motivations (pull: nature-related and culture-related; push: escape and self-confidence increase)with three types of activities: culture-related activities, prestige-related activities and entertainment.Also, the age of tourists is used as an additional predictor in the regression analysis. The findingsreveal that nature-related motivation has no significant relation with analyzed activities; culture-relatedmotivations influence culture-related and prestige-related activities. Push motivations influence bothprestige-related activities and entertainment. Age is a significant predictor for all the three activities;however, in case of entertainment the relation is negative. This adds to the current scope of scientificknowledge about predictors of the analysed types of tourist activities and has practical implications forthe development of sustainable tourism.