Push-Pull Motivation Analysis

Push factors are internal, socio-psychological forces that create the desire to travel in the first place, such as the need to escape routine, to relax, to gain prestige, or to enhance one's ego. They explain the impulse to take a trip but not where to go. Pull factors are external attributes of destinations that attract an already-motivated traveler to a specific place, such as scenery, climate, culture, attractions, and cost. Dann argued that push factors come first, since they generate the wish to travel, while pull factors then determine destination choice. The framework's insight is that explaining tourist behavior requires both forces, not just one.

Dann set out to answer the question of what makes tourists travel, and argued that the answer lies first in internal push factors rather than in the attractions of destinations. He highlighted two in particular: anomie, the sense of normlessness and isolation in modern everyday life that creates a longing to escape, and ego-enhancement, the desire for recognition and status that travel can satisfy. By foregrounding these socio-psychological needs, Dann shifted attention from where people go to why they want to go at all, establishing the push side as the starting point of motivation analysis that Crompton and later researchers then developed and measured.

Researchers survey travelers on the importance of a broad set of internal motive items, the push side, and a broad set of destination attribute items, the pull side. Factor analysis is applied to each set separately to recover coherent push dimensions, such as escape-relaxation and prestige, and pull dimensions, such as natural and cultural attractions. The two are then linked by estimating associations between the push and pull factors, revealing which internal motives go with which destination draws, for example escape motives aligning with relaxing natural settings. Travelers are often then segmented by their combined push and pull profiles for targeted marketing.