Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
(1943) hierarchy of needs, linking specific needs with identified goal-oriented
tourist behaviour, while others explicitly adapt it as, for example, in the case
of the travel career concept mentioned above. Similarly, Crompton (1979)
suggested that tourist motivation emanates from the need to restore an indi-
vidual's psychological equilibrium which may become unbalanced as a result
of unsatisfied needs.
These psychological motivational forces were subdivided by Iso-Ahola
into two simultaneous influences. On the one hand, motivation results from
the need to escape from personal or interpersonal environments while, on
the other hand, there also exists the tendency to seek intrinsic psychological
rewards from tourism. Similarly, Dann (1977) refers to 'anomie and ego-
enhancement' as primary motivational push factors, anomie being the sense
of normlessness or meaninglessness to be escaped from and ego-enhancement
representing the opportunity to address relative status deprivation. However,
like a number of other commentators, Dann (1981: 199) adopts a more socio-
logical perspective on tourist motivation. Needs are viewed 'in terms of the
(tourist) group of which the person deliberately or otherwise is a member',
rather than from the individual's psychological condition. In this sense,
tourist motivation is structured by the nature and characteristics of the soci-
ety to which the tourist belongs.
For example, Krippendorf (1986: 523) argues that 'the need to travel is
above all created by society and marked by the ordinary' and that, function-
ally, tourism is 'social therapy, a safety valve keeping the everyday world in
good working order'. Tourism, therefore, represents non-routine time when
the individual is 'emancipated from the ordinary bounds into the unbounded
realm of the non-ordinary' (Jafari, 1987). In the new, unbounded world of
the destination, the tourist has travelled beyond the margins of the ordinary
(Shields, 1991) into a state of anti-structure where ludic or liminoid behav-
iour is sanctioned or even expected (Lett, 1983; Passariello, 1983). Moreover,
tourists' 'normal' roles may be inverted, playing king/queen for a day
(Gottlieb, 1982) or regressing into a child-like existence (Dann, 1996). Thus,
fantasy becomes the dominant motivational factor, the rewards of the tour-
ism experience being the immersion into a dreamlike existence that is tem-
porary escape from the real world.
Conversely, for MacCannell (1989), the tourist is similarly motivated by
the condition of modern society but, rather than seeking fantasy, it is the
experience of reality or authenticity that is the desired outcome. Faced with
the inauthenticity of modern society, the tourist becomes, in effect, a secular
pilgrim on a quest for reality, tourism representing 'a kind of collective striv-
ing for a transcendence of the modern totality, a way of attempting to over-
come the discontinuity of modernity' (MacCannell, 1989: 13). Indeed,
whether a search for or an escape from reality, tourism may be considered a
sacred journey, being 'functionally and symbolically equivalent to other
institutions that humans use to embellish and add meanings to their lives'
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