Tourism of today plays an important role in our society and has been becoming an integral part of our life. Consequently, tourists' needs have transformed from basic into diverse. However, the studies that have been done so far seem to fail in grasping the travel consciousness, need to main focus on macro-economics such as travel demand, and economic effects.
This study started on the assumption that travel policy or travel corporations will be able to efficiently utilize travel resources to sustain tourist areas, given the information on tourist motivation, characteristics and preferences we have.
Thus, this study puts its focus on understanding and analyzing tourist motivations, tourist types and finding preferences of tourist destinations from a university students perspective, since they constantly desire to have various experiences.
Therefore, this study divides the travel behaviors of university students by examining travel motivations according to their travel behaviors, and finds out the interconnection between travel motivations and preference of tourist areas. For the theoretical ground of this study, I cited Plog's theory for travel behavioral types and Maslow's hierarchy concept for travel motivations and took a survey involving 400 college students. Out of 400 questionnaire, 367 of the questionnaire were used. Statistics such as frequency, factor analysis, ANOVA, multiple regression analysis were used also. tourist motivations are divided into two groups, primary motivations and secondary motivations.
Primary motivations include physiological and safety. Secondary motivations include belonging, esteem, self actualization and knowledge. Primary needs such as physiological and safety don't influence tourist motivations. On the other hand, secondary motivations such as esteem, self actualization and knowledge are main factors of tourist motivations. First, the examination on the relations between tourist motivations and preference attributes reveal that knowledge needs to be the first factor while esteem and self actualization need to be the second one. Second, natural environmental preference attributes lead to the choice of tourist area such as beaches, spas while recreational environmental preference attributes to cultural tourist areas, cities and resort areas.
The above mentioned study results suggest several points to consider ; travel policy or travel corporations should take travel types and tourist motivations into the first consideration and map out their marketing strategies according to travel types for the better and efficient use of tourist area. Therefore it is necessary to study tourists' preference attributes first and make a right judgement on demands. Then based on demands, develop and provide the qualities sought after by tourists.