Thai Gen Y People’ Travelling Behavior and Motivation Patterns

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to study Thai Gen Y people’ travelling behavior and motivation patterns by using quantitative research.  The populations of this study are Thai people between 22-36 years old who are living or working in various districts in Bangkok. Two data collection methods were used. The first one was the paper-based questionnaires that were sent to the samples by sampling some districts of Bangkok by method of Cluster sampling and the Quota sampling techniques was used to select some samples from each of those districts.  The last one was the online questionnaires that were submitted via the Facebook and LINE application by method of Snowball sampling technique. The number of complete responses from the sample group was 394.  R program was used to analyze the data by using descriptive statistics, such as, the frequency, percentage, mean, and standard deviation.  In addition, this study used Statistics, Factor Analysis and hypothesis testing with the Chi-squared test, T-test, F-test and multiple comparisons with LSD method.

The research found that most of Thai Gen Y people are managing their own travelling plans behaviors.  They enjoy travelling both domestic and abroad 1-3 times a year with 1-3 family members-travel ling companions by taking 3 days 2 nights on the weekend per trip. Travelling expenses are about 1,000-3,000 baht per trip and they like to travel to their destination by private cars. The most popular tourist attractions are the attractive natures. They will reserve their accommodations by the websites, such as, Agoda, Expedia, and etc.  However, if they don’t use their own private cars, they will directly book the airplane tickets with the travel agencies or the airlines.  The most influential decision-making medium is social media.  The activities that Thai Gen Y people like to do the most during their travelling are photography, sightseeing, and food tasting respectively.  To test the hypothesis that tourists with different demographic characteristics will effect different tourist behaviors, it found that the different incomes will result to different behaviors of tourists. This factor has more influence on tourist behaviors than other demographic characteristics.

The highest level of driving force that motivates Thai Gen Y people to travel is their physical and mental needs, especially the desire to relax while the demand for new social experiences is highly motivating. The motivation induced by the high level attraction factors are the interesting of destination attributes, tourism information dissemination of media and the effective transportation. Due to the hypothesis test that different demographic characteristics motivate different travelling behaviors, it found that different occupations did not result to different travelling motivations.