The Major Motivational Factors For Health Festival Attendance
Festival and event tourism has been one of the fastest growing areas of the world’s leisure industry. The following research proposal is addressed to MindBodySpirit health festival that is organized in Brisbane (Australia), which is the largest festival organized 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 behavior, 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.
The MindBodySpirit Festival is the largest and natural therapies health festival in Australia. This health festival is organized in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. This festival is founded by Graham Wilson and first festival is organized at Olympia Exhibition Centre in London in 1977.The theme of the festival was the relationships between religion, the paranormal, spiritual, natural 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. Over 41 years later, this festival is becoming famous among population all over the world. Exhibitors consists the Hare Krishna devotees, Buddhist groups, Astrologers, Vegetarians, Vegans, Yoga practitioners Wellbeing and many other groups contribute to this festival. The Brisbane health festival organize 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.
There are variety of logical and empirical tourism studies that have been done on festivals and local events. Research trends for the studies can be summarized into two main streams such as economic, social, and environmental impacts of festival and local events motivation study for festival attendees.
Health festival generates a positive impact in three areas such as attracting tourism, promoting destination image and supporting local community. Festivals play crucial role in destination promotion that is important to lure number of visitors to select destination by awareness about destination. According to Jayswal (2008), a destination is a town or city which has one or more 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, Social environment and political environment that make influence on tourists to select destination. Therefore, the destination image makes influence on tourists destination selection process.
