Exploring the Relationship between Tourist Perception and Motivation at a Museum Attraction

Abstract

Tourism activity represents one of the most dynamic and defining activities for today’s society. In this context, knowing the perception and motivation of potential tourists visiting a museum attraction represents an essential approach with implications for the sustainable development of tourist destinations. The research methodology used in the present study involved the complementary use of survey methods for data acquisition and multicriteria analysis to identify and establish relationships between perception and motivation. The results obtained from the present study show a synthetic picture regarding the perception and motivation of the tourists who visited the Crișului Land Museum from Oradea, Romania, on the one hand, and the relationships that were established between perception and motivation, on the other hand, thus confirming the research hypothesis that perception influences motivation. The perception of tourists after visiting the Crișului Land Museum in Oradea is determined by personal and interpersonal reasons, as well as by the way they perceive the visited site. The study originality consists in the use of mixed-method approaches to collect and analyze data, as a means to complement different data sources.