The chapter includes:

• Examples of tourist typologies based on activities.

• Tourists change activities within and between holidays.

• The concepts of tourist roles that may be an alternative approach to creating typologies.

• The work done on roles to the dimensions of the Leisure Motivation Scale.

• The changes since the 1980s and the way in which technologies begin to introduce other ways of experiencing holiday places and activities.

Introduction

The last chapter explored the work of humanistic psychologists and argued that, when combined with themes derived from the work of post-modernist scholars, they pose significant insights for understanding tourist motivation, behaviour and experience. Such work certainly informed the work of many tourism scholars and also provided a theoretical basis for the theory of the Travel Career Pattern and the work of Philip Pearce and others. However, on reflection, the core motives ascribed to tourists still remain akin to those studied by Beard and Ragheb in the 1980s. In a series of articles, they suggested a four-dimensional motivational model for participation in leisure activities (Beard & Ragheb, 1983) that was based on their earlier paper on measuring leisure satisfaction (Beard & Ragheb, 1980).

These four dimensions are (a) the need for stimulus avoidance (i.e. the need to escape), (b) the need for social interaction, (c) the search for knowledge and intellectual stimulation and finally (d) to gain mastery and competency. This chapter will look at these dimensions in more detail. However, it will be shown that yet again this approach is derived from the work of Abraham Maslow. However, the questionnaire they devised will be shown to be reliable, measure consistent traits, and can be used to describe tourist types.

Tourist types, or segmentation by interest, or psychographics to use alternative terminology, have long existed in the tourism literature.