No abstract

Though the student market constitutes a significant portion of revenues in the travel industry, it has received little attention in tourism research. The primary purpose of this paper is to offer an alternate approach to segmentation and to subdivide the student market on the basis of travel activity preferences of Asian and domestic university students. When a division based on ethnicity is adopted, the study findings suggest that the travel activity preferences of Asian and domestic college students are surprisingly similar. Subdividing this market by means of a factor-cluster segmentation methodology, however, yielded two cluster groups that were significantly differentiated by variables such as gender, age, source of income, length of stay, marital status and travel group size. The ability to segment this market in terms of descriptors other than ethnicity allows marketers to focus their efforts differently in their attempts to target these groups.

The purpose of the current study was to determine push motives of students attending US colleges and universities and to confirm if an existing push motivation model would find support and statistical acceptance in the college and university market. A total of 484 students were surveyed to collect data. Important push motivation factors for the college student market included ‘Knowledge’, ‘Sports’, and ‘Adventure’. Although a confirma-tory factor analysis revealed that the model was quite plausible based on the evaluation of five overall model fit indices, there were notable exceptions as well. Marketing implications based on these findings are discussed.

Travel motivation is an important concept in understanding why and how individuals make travel decisions to preferred destinations. A total of 469 responses obtained from students at a US university were analyzed to determine push and pull motivation factors toward the top 10 overseas destinations and to assess if there were significant differences in the factors across the destinations. Analysis identified seven push and six pull factors and found substantial differences in the factors across the destinations. Marketing plans and implications are suggested for promoting travel products targeting the student market.

A total of 1,488 responses obtained from an internet-based survey were analyzed to determine push and pull motivation of university students toward multi-destinations and to assess if there were statistically significant differences across the top 10 domestic destinations. Based on the analysis, six push and pull forces were appropriately delineated and substantial differences were found across the destinations. The results of this study can help more effectively predict how student travelers are pushed and pulled, and how these forces differ across U. S. domestic destinations. Marketing implications are discussed by destination.