Identifying the Relationship between Travel Motivation and Lifestyles among Malaysian Pleasure Tourists and Its Marketing Implications

This preliminary study attempts to profile the Malaysian domestic pleasure travel market based on lifestyles and travel motives as well as the relationship between the two constructs. This study also investigates the sources of information and other travel-related characteristics in the Malaysian pleasure travel marketplace. This study involves a questionnaire-survey of 248 respondents and employed factor analyses with varimax rotation as the main statistical method. Factor analysis of 50 travel motivation items selected from previous literature reveals that there are five major forms of pleasure-motivated travel, namely, Nature, Cultural, Budget, Adventure and Freedom. Nature-motivated travel emerges as the most popular type among local tourists. This may be due to the country being rich in natural attractions. Thus, this study recommends further development of the ecotourism sector to encourage more Malaysians to spend their vacation locally. Five types of lifestyle were extracted from the factor analysis of 34 AIO statements adopted from Hawes (1988). The five factors labelled as the Satisfiers, the Dreamers, the Indoors, the Achievers and the Escapist. The Satisfiers and the Dreamers are the two most dominant types of lifestyle. Generally, domestic tourists are satisfied with their present leisure activities as well as possessing high curiosity for travelling to novel tourist destinations. At the same time, the Pearson Product-moment Correlation analysis was employed to investigate the relationships between the travel motivations and lifestyle dimension. The results show that the Dreamers have significant relationships with all five forms of travel motivations. The study’s findings will assist tourism industry players in developing tourist destinations based on these underlying travel motivations and lifestyles, thus segmenting and differentiating one destination from another for further success in promoting the destinations.


Introduction
Tourism contributes significantly to the economies of many countries (APEC, 2002;WTO 1999;WTTC 1995).It is also considered as an information-intensive industry in which electronic commerce plays a very significant role.The travel and tourism industry is undergoing a period of rapid change and rapid growth that has been attributed to many factors.These include an increase in disposable income and leisure time, successful tourist promotion, technology change, and recognition by host governments that tourism is an important industry that generates foreign exchange earnings.Moreover, this is largely due to the vigorous campaigns and a systematic approach by the government to turn tourism into one of the major foreign exchange earners in the country.The revenue earned from the tourism sector increased from RM13 billion in 1999 to RM25 billion in 2002.This development could be further enhanced if the local tourists themselves give their first priority to travelling in their own country.Pleasure travel is a major and most important sector of the Malaysian tourism market as the country is rich in natural flora and fauna attractions.
Tourism is always related to human beings and to human nature, thus it is important to investigate why people travel and identify what they enjoy.Past research has shown that identifying tourist motivations can be a useful and effective approach for determining appropriate visitor opportunities and, further, that heterogeneous tourist segments can be easily categorized by these motivation factors (Keng & Cheng, 1999;Poria et al., 2004).The pleasure travel segment should be further researched to provide a better understanding of tourist behaviour, such as how they make their travel decisions.Factors such as increased leisure time, improved transportation system and higher disposable income will further enhance the growth of this enormous market (Dybka 1987).Thus, the determinations of travel motivations among pleasure based tourists can be viewed as a critical variable to understand, especially in developing an itinerary or guide programme aimed at providing a satisfactory tourist experience (Crompton, 1979;Fodness, 1994).
Pleasure-travel decisions made by tourists are not single independent choices of separate elements (including mode of transportation, accommodation used or use of travel package) but rather a complex multi-faceted decision in which the choices for different elements are interrelated and evolve in a decision process over time (Dellaert et al., 1998).Therefore, the relationship of all these elements should be studied to provide a better understanding of the travel decision process.According to Abbey (1979), tourism research is separated into demographic and behaviouristic studies.Behavioural analysis attempts to explain more concrete reasons behind purchase behaviour and the most popular behaviouristic approach for studying tourists is lifestyle analysis.Woodside and Pitts (1976) also suggested that lifestyle information could be more important in predicting foreign and domestic travel behaviour than demographic variables.
There are a limited number of studies empirically and conceptually measuring the lifestyle and travel motivations among pleasure based domestic tourists in Malaysia.It is hoped that the results of this research will enlighten travel-related service providers of this pleasure market's behaviour and preferences, thereby enabling them to suggest and develop appropriate marketing programmes that are designed to promote Malaysia's tourism products and services effectively to the local tourists.

Travel Motivations
Motivation has been referred to as psychological, biological needs and wants including the integral forces that arouse, direct and integrate a person's behaviour and activity (Dann, 1981;Pearce, 1982;Uysal & Hagan, 1993).A travel motivation/motive is defined as the set of attributes, when aggregated together, that describe a place as a travel destination.They include all elements that are related to a destination and to travelling to the places such as the physical and cultural characteristics of the destinations, and actual distance required to get to the destination (Um, 1987).According to Crompton (1979) and Fodness (1994), travel motivations are critical aspects in understanding travel behaviour.Moreover, Lubbe (1998) stressed that a consumer's motivation to travel begins when he/she realises that there are certain needs and is aware and perceives that certain destinations may have the ability to serve those needs.Mathieson and Well (1982) indicated that the tourism consumer is purposively being an active information seeker in their travel planning.Tourist's decision-making is based on their motives and motivated tourists may seek information that is relevant to their needs through friends and relatives, travel guidebooks, TV travel channel, and the Internet, etc (Peter & Olson, 1999).Tourist information search is considered a dynamic process because tourists depend on various amounts and types of information sources in facilitating their travel planning (Fodness & Murray, 1997).According to Shih (1986), a traveller's vacation is a complex process that involves the traveller's attitudes, perceptions, experience, motives, or benefit sought.According to Mok and Armstrong (1996), tourists generally have limited knowledge about a destination, especially if they have not previously visited the location and are often dependent upon symbolic information acquired from either the media or from social groups.Motivation or motive is explained as why an individual does something (Hawkins et al., 1998).Schiffman and Kanuk (1999) explained that the driving force is caused by unsatisfied or unfulfilled needs of consumers.In addition, some motivation is based on rational and emotional motives.This means that emotional motives will lead consumers to behave rationally and carefully consider all alternatives, thereby giving them the best utility and emotional motives, which are opposite to the rational motives that serve to maximize satisfaction.According to Cooper et al. (1998), most people want to travel based on their inner urges, which initiate travel demand.This phenomenon is due to differences in an individual's attitudes, perceptions, images and motivation.These factors are considered crucial and important in tourism study because of their influence in travel decision-making.Yoon and Uysal (2005) investigated the causal relationship between tourists' motivational factors with satisfaction and destination loyalty.Some of the important motivational factors measured were exciting, knowledge, escape, achievement, family togetherness, safety/fun, away from home, modern amenities, wide activities, natural scenery, night life/local cuisine, water activities, interesting town, different culture, etc.The results indicate that tourism players should provide greater attention to travellers' relaxation, family togetherness, safety and fun in appealing to the internal motivations of travellers.At the same time, the marketers should also consider the uniqueness of the destination attributes such as its attractions and activities, focusing on the emotional aspects of travellers needs.

Travel Market Segmentation and Lifestyle
Market segmentation has become one of the most valuable concepts in developing promotional strategies to better reach the market (Rovelsted & Blazer, 1983;Stynes, 1983;Crompton, 1983;Uysal 1986;Woodside et. al., 1987).In the pleasure-travel market, there is extensive prior research focusing only on the demographic variables.Javalgi et al. (1992) carried out a study to explore the pleasure travel marketplace in the United States.Their aim was to understand the differences in consumer behaviour of senior and junior travellers.The study set an initial step towards establishing an understanding of the need for developing an effective pleasure travel marketing programme to target the huge market of pleasure travel worldwide.Their findings showed that the most popular form of travel was visiting relatives and friends followed by close-to-home leisure trip and touring vacation.
According to Zablocki and Kanter (1976), a lifestyle marketing perspective recognizes that people sort themselves into groups based on the things they like to do, how they like to spend their leisure time and how they choose to spend their disposable income.Thus, an AIO (activity, interests and opinion) inventory is the fundamental approach to lifestyle study.Lifestyle allows travel marketers to create a travel package that is more compatible with the motivations, attitudes and opinions of the tourists.In turn, these choices create opportunities for market segmentation strategies that recognize the potency of a tourist's chosen lifestyle in determining types of products purchased and the specific brands most likely to appeal to a particular lifestyle segment (Solomon, 1999).Abbey's research finding suggested that travellers prefer tours designed with vacation lifestyle information to those designed with demographic data alone.Gonzalez and Bello (2002) explained that lifestyle permitted greater knowledge of variables in influencing tourist behaviour.The study conducted in Spain managed to identify five tourist lifestyles -'Home Loving', 'Idealistic', 'Autonomous', 'Hedonistic' and 'Conservative'.'Home Loving' generally focused on family life.They preferred to have a vacation accompanied by their families and domestic destinations are the most frequent for a holiday destination.'Idealistic' is the group who enjoy sport, music, theatre or outdoor activities.This segment does not spend much money on accommodation and is fond of country villages.Meanwhile, for 'Autonomous', this group sees success as fundamentally linked with individual freedom and independence and places great emphasis on enjoying life and are not attracted to cultural activities.They spend their holiday time using low-priced accommodation and prefer city destinations.The 'Hedonistic' segment consists of those attracted to pleasure and tends to travel in the company of friends.They are those people attracted to newly arrived products or services on the market.Lastly, 'Conservative' is a home-loving segment, which focuses on the wellbeing of their family and is attracted to traditional domestic seaside destinations.Hawes (1988) conducted a study of travel-related lifestyle, which was based on an age-specific (demography) study focusing on older women.Factor analysis results, indicated three major underlying dimensions within this group of travel, which were labelled as "traveller", "laid back" and "dreamer".The traveller reflects a strong vacation travel orientation and is generally associated with singleness or small household size, activeness, acceptance or liking of excitement and uncertainty, higher income and education.The 'laid back' indicates an acceptance of vacation travel but essentially of the domestic, unhurried, unexciting, quiet and relaxing, rural variety, less affluent and more concerned with indebtedness.The 'dreamers' reflect an orientation in vicarious thrills and wishing or dreaming substitute for the real thing.Television was found to be their main source of information for travel decisions.
The information search dimension is another important factor that should be given attention in order to design an effective tourism-marketing programme.Schul and Crompton (1983) concluded that search behaviour is better explained by travel-specific psychographics than by demographics.Results of factor analysis of their study reflect travel-specific behavioural characteristics that are labelled as "cultural interest", "comfort, "familiarity/convenience", "activity", "opinion leadership" and "knowledge-seeker".The importance of lifestyle descriptors are increasing in assisting the design of an effective promotional campaign as well as in the selection of suitable advertising media.The research findings also showed that lifestyle measurement is capable of differentiating between the passive information seekers and the active information seekers.
A study by Fodness and Murray (1994) indicated that travel for pleasure-oriented motives will have a higher tendency to depend on their personal experiences as the main source of information in planning their travel programme.Earlier, a study by Etzel and Wahlers (1985) found that pleasure trip importance (measured in terms of the dollar cost, duration and social importance) and the incidence of requesting information was positively correlated.Travellers who simply sought a change of scene or a rest were less likely to seek information while those who were undertaking a challenge or anticipating educational experiences were more likely to request information.Visitors to historical, fabricated and natural attractions are more likely to seek information compared to the outdoor visitors and visitors to friends and relatives.The study also found no relationship between the mode of travel and information seeking behaviour.

Objectives
Generally, this study attempts to segment Malaysian pleasure-tourists based on their lifestyles and motives of engaging in a travel activity.The specific objectives are: 1) To profile the lifestyle of pleasure based local tourists in terms of their travel motivations.
2) To examine the relationships that exists between travel motivations and lifestyle.
3) To determine the sources of information used to make travel decisions and other travel-related characteristics such as mode of transportation, type of accommodation as well as travel companions.

Methodology
The main research instrument employed for this study was questionnaires that were self-administered to 400 respondents.The Klang Valley, which is located within the state of Selangor and Federal Territory, was chosen as the sampling area.Being the most modern and advanced region economically and socially, the Klang Valley is the most densely populated region in Malaysia.Thus, a heterogeneous sample that constitutes people from all ethnic groups and various demographic characteristics can be drawn from this area.This study employs cluster sampling, a type of probability sampling, which involves the division of the sampling area into regions.From each of these regions a probability sample of organizations were chosen where the final sample is then drawn from the employees of these organizations.
The population of consumers being considered in this study is office workers that are employed in organizations and holding positions in professional, administrative and managerial, technical, clerical, sales and service areas.Based on the Malaysian Statistics Department Report 1991, the population size for eligible respondents in the Klang Valley is huge.A respondent must be at least 18 years old, have a permanent job and be interested in pleasure-travel activities.
Researching the actual consumer groups allows more valid and reliable explanations as office workers are more likely to possess purchasing power and decision making capabilities (Cacioppo & Petty, 1979).Organizations were used in this study as an effort to ensure that all respondents selected have permanent jobs as well as to obtain a high response rate.A purposive sampling method was employed to select the respondents from each participating organization.A total of 248 questionnaires were returned with an overall response rate of 62 percent.
The measurement of the lifestyles construct was based on the 34 statements of Activity-Interest-Opinion (AIO) adapted from Hawes (1988).Some modifications were made to the original statements in order to suit the Malaysian market.All the statements were designed based on a six-point Likert scale anchoring from 1 (not at all agreeable) to 6 (very agreeable).As for the construct of travel motives, 50 items were identified from the review of past literature.Respondents were required to indicate the importance of the motives related to their pleasure travel activities on a six-point scale ranging from 1 (not at all important) to 6 (very important).Factor analysis using principal component with orthogonal Varimax rotation was employed to summarize the original items (both travel lifestyles and motivation variables) into smaller sets of newly correlated composite dimensions.Cronbach's coefficient alpha was used to assess the internal reliability of the factors identified.Subsequently, Pearson product-moment correlation was performed to measure the association between the underlying factors of pleasure travel motivations and lifestyle dimensions.

Factor Analysis -Pleasure Travel Motivations
From the Varimax rotated factor matrix, seven factors representing 71.45 percent of the explained variance was extracted from the original 50 statements.Only factors with loading equal to, or greater than, 0.50 and with eigenvalues equal to or greater than 1 are considered significant in this study.The results show that alpha coefficients for five factors ranged from 0.75 to 0.90 and eigenvalues from 1.24 to 6.70.These five factors are named as "nature", "culture", "budget", "adventure" and "freedom".They explain 69.45 percent of the variance.Table 1 summarizes the factor analysis results of pleasure-travel motivations.
Factor 1: Nature.This factor contains seven items and explained 35.26 percent of the variance with an eigenvalue of 6.70.The seven items are: "wilderness and undisturbed nature", "learn about nature", "birds", "trees and wildflowers", "mountains", "photography of landscape/wildlife" and "rural areas".
Factor 2: Culture.Loaded with four items, this factor explained 11.54 percent of the variance with an eigenvalue of 2.19 The four items consist of "cultural activities", "local crafts", "museums, art galleries" and "live theatres and musicals".
Factor 3: Budget.Accounting for 10.51 percent of the variance and loaded with only three items.The items labelled "reduced fares", "budget accommodation" and "inexpensive meals".The eigenvalue for this factor is 2.00.
Factor 4: Adventure.This factor explained 6.52 percent of the variance with an eigenvalue of 1.24.There are three items in this factor: "be daring and adventurous", "participate in sports" and "be physically active.
Factor 5: Freedom.Two items were involved that explain 5.63 percent of the variance and with an eigenvalue of 1.07.The items labelled as "change from a busy job" and "free to act the way I feel".

Pleasure Tourist's Lifestyle
Factor analysis with varimax rotation is used to identify the underlying dimension of tourist's lifestyles from the 34 statements.Five factors with eigenvalues from 1.49 to 2.64 were extracted (Table 2).The first factor, labelled as "the Satisfiers", explained 18.83 percent of the variance with an eigenvalue of 2.64.It carries five items related to self-satisfaction.The second factor, identified as "the Dreamers", which consists of two items with an eigenvalue of 1.74 explained 12.45 of variance.This factor is related to desire for future travel.The third factor called "the Indoors", which has three items, explained 12.15 of the variance with an eigenvalue of 1.70.It consists of statements, which reflected the interest for indoor activities that were influenced by television advertisements.The next factor, named as "the Achievers", has the highest alpha (79 percent) of reliability analysis.It explained 11.92 percent of the variance with an eigenvalue of 1.67."The Achievers" consists of items reflecting their previous travel experiences."The Escapists" is the final factor representing 10.67 percent of the variance with an eigenvalue of 1.49.Two items identified in this factor reflected a passive-type of holiday.

Relationships between Travel Motivations and Travel Lifestyles
Table 3 shows the results of Pearson product-moment correlation between pleasure travel motivations and lifestyle factors.There is no significant relationship between two types of lifestyle -"the satisfiers" and "the achievers" with any type of travel motivation.However, "the satisfiers" have a relationship with two other segments of lifestyle factors -"the achievers" and "the tranquillity".In contrast, "the dreamers" have relationships with all five types of travel motivations and to "the achievers"."The Escapists" have a significant relationship with only three types of travel motivations -"budget", "adventure" and "freedom".While "the indoors" is related with only one type of travel motivation -"culture".

Pleasure Travel Sources of Information
A large majority (55.51 percent) of the respondents made their pleasure destination decisions based on recommendations from their friends/relatives as their main source of information.The second important source was printed tourism materials (36.0percent), closely followed by their own personal experience/knowledge (35.56 percent).Meanwhile, the Internet channel was found to be the least important source of information for the local pleasure tourists with a mean of 17.50.Table 4 summarizes the overall results discussed above.

Pleasure Travel-related Characteristics
With reference to Table 5, personal transport is the most preferred means of transportation (56.9 percent) followed by public transport (32.7 percent).Rented transport on the other hand is not a popular mode (4.4 percent).Hotel/motel was identified as the most popular type of accommodation (46.4 percent).A total of 24.2 percent of respondents preferred a chalet followed closely by 20.2 percent that chose to stay at their relative/friend's house.In terms of travel companion, the majority or 84.3 percent of respondents preferred to be accompanied by their relatives/friends while only 5.6 percent chose to travel alone.Only 10.1 percent of the respondents used a travel package to organize their trip.

Discussion and Marketing Implications
The study revealed five main types of pleasure-motivated travel in the Malaysian domestic tourism industry.Nature-motivated travel emerged as the most popular type of motivation to travel by domestic tourists.This phenomenon could also help explain the boom in ecotourism and agro tourism segments of tourism in this country as well as in the world as a whole.Lindberq (1991) revealed that tourism overall has been growing at 4 percent annually but nature travel is growing at 10 percent to 30 percent each year.Malaysia should focus on nature-based tourism as its main market positioning since this form of pleasure travel managed to attract not only foreign tourists but also the domestic tourists.As there is a correlation between "nature" and "freedom", any promotion planning should focus on these travel motivations in encouraging local tourists to take a vacation in Malaysia's outstanding nature destinations.This particular approach is important in attracting "the dreamers" to spend their leisure time in the country.This approach can be enhanced by using testimonial advertisements on television as it will create 'word of mouth' communication among locals.
Culture-based was the second most popular motivation in the pleasure tourism activities.Apart from its geographic attraction, Malaysia's major asset is its multi-racial and multi-cultural population, which is reflected in its festivals, food and general way of life (Cockerell 1994).This phenomenon could explain the reason why culture-based was one of the main travel motivations for embarking on pleasure travel by Malaysians in their own country.
"The indoors" is the only type of lifestyle reported to have a relationship with culture-based tourism.This factor consists of individuals who depend very much on passive or push promotions as their main source of information in making their travel decision.Among the most popular push promotion's related to "the indoors" is television advertisements.Therefore, culture-based tourism activities or destinations need to be advertised more regularly and efficiently through the television media compared to other media.Domestic tourists are more concerned with their travel expenses in organizing their pleasure activities.There is a relationship between "budget" in other types of travel motivations -"freedom", "nature" and "culture".It also correlates with "the Dreamers" and "the Escapists".Domestic tourists are normally more concerned with the core products of the travel activities or destinations and not on the augmented products (etc.transportation, accommodation).Therefore, they will usually seek budget accommodation, reduced fares and inexpensive meals when conducting their trip.
"The Escapists" are those individuals who prefer to engage in a more passive kind of travel.Resting and relaxing are all that they want to do while on their vacation.The accommodation for this segment tended more towards the rustic than the lavish.They will also search for a low fare for their trips, as this will not burden their finances as well as their mind while engaging in the trip.Since, people frequently associate tranquillity with suburban or rural environments, in the future, tourism developers/players need to focus on the development of medium class hotels rather than high class accommodation, especially in the suburban tourist destinations.
Tourism players must also concentrate on designing more attractive value-based travel packages to cater for the needs of this segment.They can develop family packages because most domestic tourists prefer to spend their holidays with family.This allows them to channel their leisure time towards improving relationships between the parents and children.The package should include all of the main travel components (transport, accommodation, meals and destination tour) at an attractive or special pricing.This strategy will also encourage "the Dreamers" to spend their money locally for their future vacations.
Adventure-based is the second most important travel motivation in the Malaysian pleasure tourism.Nature tourism and ecotourism activities seemed to be very important components in the mix of so-called adventure product experiences (Wight 1996) as the activities include hiking, rafting, canoeing, cycling, kayaking, horseback riding and wildlife viewing.This is reflected by a relationship resulting from the correlation analysis between the adventure and nature and culture and budget based tourism.Adventure tourism has a perfect correlation with budget-based type of travel.It can be concluded that local tourists engaged in adventure tourism are likely to select from a range of adventure-type accommodation such as cabins, camping or bed and breakfast, which are relatively low in budget.
The final form of pleasure travel is "freedom".This is a type where tourists want to experience a change from their busy life or job and to feel free to act the way they want to."Freedom" has relationships with all other travel motivations since all types are a form of escapism from routine life.Everyone is searching for change, some do it actively and others passively.Tourism is actually escapism from ones routine life.Therefore, tourism players should assist their customers in planning and designing their own tailored vacation package.It is advisable for local tourist agencies to work as a consortium or build a wide network with various other tourism operators in the country to fulfil all the tourist needs and wants.
Lastly, "the satisfier" is the factor for those tourists that are satisfied with their life and have the capacity to enjoy better leisure time.Thus, tourism marketers should attract this segment, which is composed of people attracted to pleasure and enjoying life.Tourism players can offer them a range of choices, attractive tour packages incorporating stays in hotels of a certain charm, of medium to high category.This should be backed up in other mass media.TV advertising around the time of news programmes and print media including certain types of magazines seem the most appropriate to inform them.The messages could be connected to provide comfort, peaceful and simple holidays for the family to enjoy.

Conclusion
Pleasure travel is expanding in Malaysia, thus, requiring a behaviouristic study to have a better understanding of this lucrative market.Lifestyle segmentation is one of the most valuable tools in developing promotional strategies to reach the market effectively.The segmentation of the market that emerged divides into five factors: "the Satisfiers", "the Dreamers", "the Indoors", "the Achievers" and "the Escapists" and five major motives of pleasure travel: "nature", "culture", "budget", "adventure" and "freedom".These labels try to give a general idea of lifestyle and travel motivations of pleasure tourists.The current study adopted a cross-sectional design, which was conducted at one point in time.While it provides a useful "snapshot" of consumer or travellers/users data and helps understanding the phenomenon under study, it does not explain the possible changes in travellers/users' attitudes and behavioural characteristics over time.According to De Wulf (1999), a longitudinal study can detect attitudes and behavioural changes over time and allows stronger inferences to be drawn from the dynamic elements of behaviour.Future research should collect longitudinal data to test the predicative validity that exists between travel web site effectiveness characteristics and intention to use travel web sites.The characteristics of each are much more extensive than the label defining them.Furthermore, these labels and characteristics would not correspond precisely to those to be found in other countries.However, the methodology can be adapted to any location/place.

Table 1 .
Factor Analysis Results: Forms of Pleasure Travel

Table 3 .
Correlation Analysis: Forms of Travel and Types of lifestyle The