The typology of inbound tourists visiting Iran

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.Validerat; 20101217 (root