ABSTRACT
This chapter describes people’s motivations in visiting tourism destinations for leisure trips. It explains the factors that affect people’s selection of destinations. The chapter also explains the process by which destination images are formed and how destination images impact upon destination selection. It reviews the process of travel purchase behaviour, and deals with the different stages that travellers tend to go through. The chapter focuses on market segmentation in tourism and the main ways of classifying people into distinct groups. It also reviews the market trends in tourism. The chapter outlines markets and people’s travel behaviours. It presents motivational theories that have been proposed for tourism, leisure and recreation. One travel purchase behaviour process model has tourists passing through seven sequential steps: need recognition, search for information, pre-purchase evaluation of alternatives, purchase, consumption, post-consumption evaluation, and remembering and sharing. The chapter concludes with the predominant market trends that are impacting tourism destinations.
