Analysis Of Major Motivational Factors For MindBodySpirit Health Festival Attendance

Introduction

Festivals play crucial role in tourism industry. The following research proposal is addressed to MindBodySpirit health festival organised in Brisbane (Australia), which is the largest festival organised for human wellbeing and natural therapies performed by tourists. The main purpose of this proposal is to determine the major motivational factors for festival attendance. Furthermore, it generates insights into Tourism market behaviour, which needs to be considered when promoting destination and health awareness to attract variety of visitors such as local, regional and international tourist. The nature of this research is descriptive.

According to Ralston and Crampton (1988), this study indicates the seven motivational factors such as stimulus seeking, family get together, socialization, observing new people, learning and discovery, escape from social and personal pressures. Another researcher Uysal et al. (1991) described five motivational factors including excitement, external, family, socializing and relaxation by using the US Pleasure travel market data.

For leisure and tourism researchers, therefore, gaining knowledge of festival visitors’ characteristics, especially, their healthy habits, is crucial for understanding the expanding health festival market. In addition, there is a growing stream of research focusing on the motivations of festival attendees.

Background

The MindBodySpirit Festival is the largest and natural therapies health festival in Australia. This health festival is organised in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. This festival is founded by Graham Wilson and first festival is organised at Olympia Exhibition Centre in London in 1977. The idea behind this festival was to represent the bonding between religion, spiritual, emotional healing, consciousness and personal growth. This festival was subsequently presented in New York, Los Angeles, Cork, San Francisco, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and most of the main cities. This festival offers various workshops, lectures by authors and authorities, as well as it’s a mixture of music and performances. Approximately, after 41 years, this festival is becoming famous among population all over the world. The Brisbane health festival organise series of seminars of International and Australian expertise who share their knowledge regarding healthy habits, spiritual guidance and psychic readings. This entire festival consists of community purposes, individual needs and social norms. This festival offers yoga activities that relates to physical health as well as mental well-being of human. Moreover, it offers variety of activities such as yoga classes, practitioner speeches, food stalls, shopping materials, musical performances for entertainment purposes.

Problem Definition

The following management decision is considered to address the problem: How to attract local as well as international visitors to attend health festival?

Literature Review

There are various logical and verifiable tourism theories that have been applied on festivals.

Destination Promotion: Health festival generate a positive impact in three areas: to lure tourists, promote destination and supporting local community. Festivals play an important role in destination promotion that is crucial to lure visitors to select destination. According to Jayswal (2008), a destination can have single or multiple attractions. Brisbane is a subtropical destination that offer wide range of experiences to visitors in terms of nature such as coastal experience and natural surrounding as well because of the holistic nature. There are variety of factors like cultural attraction, weather, Society and political environment that make influence on tourists to select destination. Destination promotions can automatically increase tourism activities and enhance attendees in festival.

Tourism motivational factors: Motivation is one of the most complicated areas in tourism research as it offers various challenges that derived from intangible nature of multiple motivation phenomenon. The consumer motivation research has two basic issues: (a) observing the interrelationships between motives and specific behaviour, (b) developing the detail of the consumer motivation which would reflect all kinds of motives that affect consumer attitude.

The “push and pull” theory, which was proposed by Dann (1977, 1981) and Crompton (1979), are in the similar generic category to the dimensions of the escape-seeking disagreement. The “pull” factors are the external forces representing the destination features such as gravitations, recreation facilities, services that allure the person towards destination while “Push” factors are the internal forces related to the needs and wants that motivate a person to choose a destination like the desire for rest or adventure. Based on the “push and pull” model, Crompton (1979) further identified nine motives, that consists seven “push” factors such as interruption, exploration, relaxation, dignity, regression, improvement in relationships, social gettogether and two “pull” factors such as innovation and education for pleasure vacation. However, it is noticeable that “push and pull” factors of motivation are often act as dependent variables. For example, people visit a destination because they are “pushed” by their inner forces and simultaneously “pulled” by the exterior forces of the destination.

Socialization: This is one of the important motivational factors to improve attendance of visitors based on their previous experience. Based on an extensive literature review of recent festival motivation research, Petrick and Li (2006) concluded that whatever the theme of the festival is, socialization is always in the top five factors that motivate people to attend the festival, while other motivational factors varied based on the type of the event.

Learning: Learning was identified as a motivational factor for festival attendance in Raybould (1998) and Chang (2006), but Crompton (1979) considered learning as a pull factor for tourism. Therefore, it is problematic to consider learning a festival attendance motivation.

Entertainment comes from the desire to enjoy the stimulating and exciting events of the unique festival environment. The following are some measurement for this factor: 1) because it is stimulating and exciting, 2) to feel relax with entertainment, and 3) because visitors want to experience something specific or unique things.

Festival attraction: It comes from the desire to enjoy the atmosphere and events of a unique festival environment. The following are some typical measurement items for this factor: 1) to enjoy special events, 2) to enjoy a uniqueness of an atmosphere, and 3) to enjoy the festival mood.

To conclude, festival attraction involves enjoying the special events, atmosphere or environment of festivals.

Consumer behaviour and satisfaction

According to Cronin et al. , 2000; Lee et al. , 2007, 2011, the empirical studies have supported that observed value midmost the effect of quality on both satisfaction and behavioural intention. Understand the needs of visitors to fulfill their satisfaction level through their previous festival experiences. Moreover, the residents attitude towards visitors could be effect on Tourists visits.

Medical Tourism for health awareness

Medical tourism industry is constantly growing multi-billion-dollar industry in this era to attract tourists. The idea behind this industry is the amount of resources that countries around the globe are putting into attracting the medical tourist by offering high quality, low cost, specialized care with attendant and hospitality benefits. Medical Tourism is an important part to motivate tourists towards health festivals and aware about the importance of healthy activities.