Exploring Students’ Push and Pull Motivations to Visit Rural Educational Tourism Sites in China

Abstract

Educational tourism in rural areas promotes local employment, economic development, and poverty alleviation. Given that there is a lack of research on emerging and developing nations, this study adopted the viewpoint of an emerging country and empirically demonstrates the relationships of consumer behavior with education tourism in rural areas. In particular, the study focused on push-pull motivation factors and loyalty. The mediating role of overall satisfaction on the relationship between push-pull motivation and loyalty was also investigated. The study extracted questions from a sample of 234 students in China and quantitatively analyzed the data using a structural equation model (SEM). The results show that pull motivation factors contribute directly to loyalty, and push motivation was the strongest construct influencing loyalty through overall satisfaction. The results show that in this field, managers need to pay more attention to push and pull motivation at different marketing stages.