The Impact of Push and Pull Factors and Attitudes Towards Religion on Korean Travelers Intention to Visit Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The Korean travel market is one of the most important international markets for many countries around the world. Millions of Koreans travel abroad each year either for business, leisure, or holiday. However, many Saudi researchers are yet to shine the light and further investigate this. In order to increase the number of Korean travelers who are visiting Saudi Arabia, it is important to learn and understand what are the push and pull factors that will influence their travel-related intention for developing appropriate marketing strategies to attract them. Also, to find out if their attitudes towards religion had an impact on their travel intention to visit Saudi Arabia, is it a positive impact or a negative impact? This study was aiming to examine travel intention of Korean travelers to Saudi Arabia by using the push and pull motivational factor. The main objective of this research paper was to determine the impact of push and pull factors on travel intentions among Korean travelers. Next, the research paper analyzed how did push and pull factors impacted Korean travelers Intention to visit Saudi Arabia and how did the effect of attitudes towards religion motivated travelers and transformed their motivation into action (travel intention). To test the hypotheses and relationship between the variables, the survey data was analyzed through a factor analysis, reliability test, correlation test, as well as hierarchical multi-regression. A total of 254 valid Korean participants in and outside of Korea took part in the questionnaire survey, for which a snowball sampling technique was used. From the results, it was found that there was a significant relationship between push factors and Korean travel intention. It was also found that there was a significant relationship between their attitudes towards religion and their travel intention. The results of this study help to provide insight into which push and pull factors the Saudi Arabia tourism and marketing industry should focus on to better reach, attract, and stimulate the travel intentions of Korean tourists to Saudi Arabia.