Motivation and personality traits for choosing religious tourism. A research on the case of Medjugorje.

Religion has long been a primary motivation for journeys and it is considered the oldest non-economic reason for travelling. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the reasons tourists choose to travel to sacred sites, with the specific aim of discovering relationships between personality traits and motivations for religious travel. Participating in the research were 679 Italian travellers to Medjugorje sanctuary, who completed the travel motivation scale and big five questionnaire. The results show that motivation is focused prevalently on the need for discovery in men and socialisation in women. Multiple regression analyses demonstrated that personality traits are predictive of motivation factors differently for males and females.