Examining the adventure traveller behaviour - Personality, motives and socio-demographic factors as determinants for German adventure travel

Abstract

Adventure tourism has established itself as a concept and a field of research within tourism. While the German tourism market is one of the biggest in the world, no evidence exists on the German adventure traveller. In adventure tourism research in general, there is little evidence on how personality, motives, and socio-demographic factors distinguish the choice for soft and hard adventure activities. Therefore, this quota-based survey among 1,500 German travellers does investigate demographics, motives and personality aspects. A logistic regression analysis is performed to categorize tourists into soft and hard adventure travellers. Gender and age are descriptive characteristics, as well as extraversion and going on adventures to get to know oneself better. This research helps to better understand German hard adventure travellers and enables operators to cater specifically to the needs of the target group.