The typology of inbound tourists visiting Iran

Abstract: Tourism and tourists has become a characteristic feature of current
societies. Cities and regions are being planned and transformed in a way
that they will attract more tourists and tourism investors. With the
increasing improvement of tourism industry, the custodians of this industry
should have plans to improve and construct new facilities, adequate plans
for the entertainment of tourists so that they can have a higher income
from this industry. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to deliberate
more about motivation, personality, reasons and patterns of inbound
tourists with emphasis on tourists staying at hotels in Tehran. Data gained
will be given to managers, programmers and responsible peoples in the
tourism industry, with the intention that they can organize a plan to
develop effective investment and management programs.

So far extensive research on the destination, and personality and
typology of tourists has been done and it has proven that there is a very
close relation between personality of tourists and their motives for
choosing their destination. In Iran there have been few researches carried
out on the topic but not exactly under this title. The lack of applied
research on this subject in Iran has motivated me to do this research.

This research is done with the purpose of knowing more about motivation,
reasons and patterns of foreign tourists so that the result can be
forwarded to managers, programmers and responsible people in tourism
industry. Because on these results, related organizations can organize
tourism activities, plan investments, provide ideal standards and services
which would pare the ground for scientific management of the programs at
destination points.

The population includes all the tourists traveling to Iran from August 22nd
to December 11th. In this study, the emphasis is on the tourists who stay
in hotels of Tehran, but because there are many hotels in this city,multi-
phase cluster sampling method was used. Therefore, first, randomly 10
hotels out of all hotels in Tehran were chosen, then 10 tourists were
chosen randomly among tourists staying in each of these hotels. A sample of
100 tourists was gathered.

To evaluate personal characteristics of these tourists and to find out
their motives of Choosing Iran as their destination, questionnaires were
used. The questionnaire that has been used was partly designed by
researcher and partly designed by professor Plog. The questionnaire has two
separate parts, its first 8 questions has been adopted from professor
Plog’s famous travel personality quiz. Second part of this questionnaire
which is designed by the researcher evaluates the tourists’ motivations for
traveling to Iran.

This thesis indicates that the predominant types of tourists visiting Iran
are of “Venturer” personality and as it has been mentioned before, these
groups are characterized as "adventurous, self-confident, curious,outgoing,
belonging to higher income levels. Moreover, in this thesis 14 motives were
proposed and the relations between every motive with these two types of
personality were studied. It also has been found that there is a
significant difference between male and female in regard to some motives.
Furthermore, the relation between age- groups and the motives has
been studied and it can be viewed in table 4-27.