What are the push and pull factors of tourism?

Answer 1

An early paradigm for understanding tourist motivation is the push-pull model. This is based on the distinction between factors which encourage individuals to move away from their home setting through tourism (push factors) and those attributes of a different place which attract or 'pull' them towards it.

Push factors are evident at the individual or social level, or as a combination of both. Anomie, for instance, relates to a breakdown in society itself and may be manifested in escalating crime, increased drug addiction, decline in Law and Order or, in general, high rates of social disintegration. Those who perceive their own environment in such negative terms become disposed to seeking out alternative places where defects of this nature are considered to be minimal or non-existent. Poor health, on the other hand, is usually an individual push factor which influences the decision to relocate temporarily to more curative and benign milieux, while feelings ofnostalgia may be experienced personally and collectively, inclining people to look for alternatives to the unbearable present and dreaded future in locations reminiscent of the selective good times of the past. On the other hand, pull factors refer to the qualities of the destination area which are either natural (such as the climate or topography), derived (the warmth of the people) or contrived (theme parks or hotels).

For analytical purposes, push factors precede pull factors both logically and temporally, since the decision whether or not to travel is prior to a specific choice of destination. In practice, however, such decision making may be virtually simultaneous. It follows from the above that the most effective forms of tourism promotion are those which attempt to match the pull factors of the destination with the push factors in the client (matching supplyand demand, including target marketing). Thus the urge to satisfy curiosity in the potential tourist, for instance, can be matched with novel and exotic experiences in faraway places.

BY Sapan Gupta