Mature vs. youth travelers: The Korean market

An important consideration in understanding and predicting tourist behavior concerns the underlying motivation governing the choice of tourist destinations, and the tourists” evaluation and level of satisfaction with the actual experiences (Pearce, 1991). Motivation is a fundamental element in helping to explain tourist behavior. Unfortunately, the research on motivation has only received moderate attention, both conceptually and empirically. A new theoretical framework employed in sociology and social psychology has recently been proposed by Pearce to explain tourism motivation. It is known as the “Travel Career Ladder” (TCL). This paper attempts to reveal comprehensive information on the travel motivations of Korean tourists with regards to overseas trips by employing the concepts predicated in the TCL model. The implications of this research are discussed in terms of the potential of the TCL model, and to what end it can be used to predict tourist behavior and improve the level of cross‐cultural unders...