Linking Travel Motivations and Willingness to Support Sustainable Tourism: A Case of Visitors to Tanzania

Abstract

The growing tourists’ arrivals to various destinations worldwide in connection to the efforts to attain sustainable tourism development create the need for understanding the main travel motivations as linked to travelers support to sustainable tourism. Currently there are few studies that have been conducted to link tourists travel motivation and their willingness to support sustainable tourism development. The primary objective of this study was to examine the link between tourists travel motivations and their willingness to support sustainable tourism development. Employing a survey strategy, data were collected using a self-administered questionnaire and the results from statistical analysis indicate that, all the thirteen items measuring tourists’ support for sustainable tourism rated high with mean scores above 5. Further, the p-values of the t-tests were less than the 1% level of significance for nature, family and accomplishment motivations indicating that the beta coefficients of these three dimensions were significant, and explained some of the variation in tourist’s willingness to support sustainable tourism. This article propose an integrated approach to understand tourists’ motivations and how they are linked to willingness to support sustainable tourism so as to secure long-term existence of tourism as an industry.