Not on vacation - triggering travel in response to trauma

Motivations for travel have been understood as a function of vacation behaviour based on the premise of travel for leisure or pleasure. However, this focus on vacation as the principal motivator for travel has left a significant gap in understanding of traveller motivations where travel is undertaken in response to a trigger event that did not, at least initially, include leisure as the principal motivation. This qualitative, grounded theory study examined the travel motivations of individuals who had not ‘gone on vacation’. The travel trigger events that energise an individual’s motivations were categorised into three main types including; social and cultural, emotional or environmental events. It was found that these categories align with previous consumer behaviour research classification of situational, influential and reactional triggers.