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A Review of Festival and Event Motivation Studies1

In the past couple of decades, festival and event tourism has been one of the fastest growing sections of the world leisure industry (Getz, 1991; Nicholson & Pearce,
2001), and has received increasing attention by academic researchers. In addition to commonly targeted topics such as economic impact, marketing strategies of mega events, and festival management (Getz, 1999; Gnoth & Anwar, 2000; Raltson &
Hamilton, 1992; Ritchie, 1984), there is a growing stream of research focusing on the motivations of attendees. It has been agreed that understanding motivations, or the
“internal factor that arouses, directs, and integrates a person’s behavior” (Iso-Ahola
1980, cited in Crompton & McKay, 1997, p. 425), leads to better planning and marketing of festivals and events, and better segmentation of participants.
The reasons to conduct festival and event motivation studies were aptly articulated by Crompton and McKay (1997). They believed that studying festival and event motivation is a key to designing offerings for event attendees, a way to monitor satisfaction, and a tool for understanding attendees’ decision-making processes. The present note attempts to briefly review motivational studies related to festival and event tourism. It is believed that such an effort will help identify existing theoretical and methodological problems, and clarify future research directions.
The authors, for the purpose of this study, defined “event and festival tourism” as activities, planning, and management practices associated with public, themed occasions. Although some authors stress the distinction between motive and motivation,
1

The authors thank Ms. Heidi Heinsohn for her inputs to the earlier draft of this paper.

with motive referring to a generic behavioral energizer, and motivation as object -specific
(Gnoth, 1997), this note uses the two terms interchangeably.
Conceptual Background
Getz (1991, p.

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