Segmentation of rural tourists: combining push and pull motivations

Abstract

Rural tourism is an important form of tourism in many countries, including Finland. To understand rural tourists’ behaviour and help tourism companies market their products more efficiently many scholars have segmented rural tourists in several different geographical locations. This study aims to combine segmentation approaches used in earlier studies, namely motivation and benefit segmentation, and segment online rural tourists in Finland. Data is collected in a rural tourism affiliate website and analysed using cluster analysis on tourists’ motivations. Among 727 respondents, four rural tourist segments are found: “Social travellers”, “Wellbeing travellers”, “Home region travellers” and “Family travellers”. The segments differ from each other in motivations, preferred destination attributes, travel behaviour and sociodemographic factors. Understanding these differences will provide rural tourism companies important information to successfully market their products by combining both push and pull motivations in their marketing and product development.