Relations of tourist push and pull motivations with their activities: The case of Lithuania

Tourist motivations are typically grouped into push and pull categories, and this classification is helpful for numerous analytical purposes. The objective of this study is to analyze how push and pull motivations are related with tourist activities in a destination country. Typically, pull motivations trigger tourist involvement in activities that are closely related with these motivations (like culture-related motivations with culture-related activities; nature-related motivation with nature-related activities, etc.). However, this is much less obvious in case of push motivations, since there are few activities that could be directly linked with the latter. The identified research gap needs to be explored. Possible tourist activities in a visited country are often rather typical; however, more specific preferences are influenced by the specifics of a destination, travel programme concepts and other characteristics of a particular trip. This makes the analysis of the relationship between motivations and activities relevant to broad contexts, but also allows one to include specifics of an analysed country. The study analyses a relation of push and pull motivations with tourist activities in Lithuania on the basis of a tourist survey that includes 374 respondents from 47 countries. The analysis is concentrated on linking four motivations (pull: nature-related and culture-related; push: escape and self-confidence increase) with three types of activities: culture-related activities, prestige-related activities and entertainment. Also, the age of tourists is used as an additional predictor in the regression analysis. The findings reveal that nature-related motivation has no significant relation with analyzed activities; culture-related motivations influence culture-related and prestige-related activities. Push motivations influence both prestige-related activities and entertainment. Age is a significant predictor for all the three activities; however, in case of entertainment the relation is negative. This adds to the current scope of scientific knowledge about predictors of the analysed types of tourist activities and has practical implications for the development of sustainable tourism. © 2018 WIT Press.