Market segmentation by reasons and influences to visit a destination: The case of international visitors to Australia

This paper is about segmenting international holiday travelers on the basis of their motivations to travel to a certain destination - in this case Australia. For this task, using a two-step procedure, we clustered complementary reasons for, and influences on, travel to Australia by visitors, whose primary travel purpose was leisure. The results revealed that there are two groups of visitors. Members of cluster 1 (62.3%) turn out to be com-parably older, originate predominantly from Asia, New Zealand, and the US, and visit relatives and stay either at a friend's or relative's home as well as hotels. In contrast, visitors defining cluster 2 (37.7%) are comparably younger, originate mainly from Europe and Japan, stay in a variety of types of accommodation, and experience a broad panoply of what Australia has to offer, while in some cases working. The results further suggest that (1) immigrants from comparably nearby origin markets fuel an increasing demand with regard to interpersonal relations to their home country (cluster 1), and (2) Australia proves to be an attractive destination especially in long-haul markets with high international travel propensity, such as Europe and Japan as opposed to the US (cluster 2).