ABSTRACT
The Balearic Islands are one of the most important holiday tourism resorts of the Mediterranean. They are an archipelago composed of four major islands, Mallorca, Menorca, Eivissa and Formentera. According to the Spanish Tourism Studies Institute (Frontur, 2006), the Balearic Islands attract 17.3 percent (approximately 9.6 million) of the total international visitors that travel to Spain. Mallorca is the largest island and attracts the highest share of international arrivals. Specifically Mallorca welcomed 79.1 percent of the international visitors to the Balearics. Germans (approximately 40 percent), followed by British citizens (35 percent) are the two largest markets. International visitors have been increasing lately at average rates of 1 percent yearly. International visitors are classified by official tourism bodies according to tourist motivations into four categories: “leisure/entertainment,” “work/ business,” “personal (such as health or family)” and “other motivations.” This classification is rather poor and not very suitable and efficient when we deal with resorts basically orientated to holidays such as Mallorca, a tourism destination where, according to the local tourism ministry, 93 percent of its visitors have as a basic motivator leisure and holidays (Inestur, 2007). Therefore, given the importance of tourism in Mallorca and the importance that the island has on the overall Spanish tourism industry, it seems reasonable to analyze deeply tourist motivations for visiting the island, instead of simply grouping them under the rather obvious and “low information” heading of “leisure.” This research has therefore two basic goals; first to identify and classify the motivations of tourists visiting Mallorca, and second to analyze how these motivations influence their satisfaction levels. This research has been conducted in a specific tourism resort, Mallorca (Spain). Some research such as the one conducted by Kozak (2002) or the one by Nicolau and Más (2006) analyze tourism motivations of Spanish visitors; however, they do not take into account the relationship between motivations and one of the most important long-term resort performance indicators – tourist
satisfaction. We believe that in order to discover why tourists travel on a certain holiday, it is crucial to identify first what the visitors are looking for there. Also, through the analysis of the existing relations between expected and obtained satisfaction, it may be possible to find out whether the tourists have fulfilled their expectations. This information is basic to tourism managers in order to point out what is to be improved and promoted to favor a better and profitable image of the tourism destination.
