What motivates event tourists

Author’s final manuscript version. This paper examines the factors which influence event tourists to attend a particular event. Whilst tourism is an established academic field of study any focus on events as a specific area of research has only recently emerged. As a consequence, little if any research evidence connecting the two exists. In particular, motivation of event tourists appears to be under researched. The review of existing research reported in this paper addresses this gap by firstly reviewing the literature on motivation and what motivates people to be tourists and event attendees. This will then enable a typology of event tourists to be developed for further research