摘要：Festivals and special events are considered important motivators fortourism. Thus, event tourism has become one of the fastest growing types of tourism.In a competitive festival and event tourism market understanding visitor motivationis extremely important for tourism promotion and planning. Therefore, designingbetter products and services to meet the participants’ demands and motivations isvital to maintain high satisfaction levels and to determine return visits and this can beachieved only through a clear understanding of the motives to attend these events.While there is a solid literature on event tourism motivation, this is mainly based onstudies of large-scale events and festivals from Western, developed countries. Thepresent study investigated whether the existing motivation scale could be reliablyused in a different cultural and economic setting and for small-scale events.Consequently, it focused on three small-scale festivals and events organized inIstanbul, the largest city in Turkey with over 13 million inhabitants. The study foundthat, while there may be differences in the motivations (and the strength of themotivations) for attending different types of events, the event motivation scale, asdesigned by previous studies could be considered universally valid.
