Novelty Seeking Levels and Cultural Destination Preferences of Academician Cultural Tourists

Novelty seeking is one of most important subjects in terms of understanding of tourist motivations and behaviors. In the literature review, it has been observed that the subject of novelty seeking is evaluated in terms of some other types of tourists. However, it is not evaluated in terms of cultural tourists whose one of the main motivations is the novelty seeking. At this point the main purpose of this study is to determine novelty seeking levels of domestic cultural tourists, and to ascertain destination choice differences between cultural tourist clusters with different novelty seeking levels. In this context, the novelty seeking scale developed by Assaker et al., (2011, 2013, 2014) was applied to measure novelty seeking levels of participants, and the survey was conducted on the sample of academician cultural tourists. Data collection activities were conducted online in May 2018, and 563 people were reached as sampling. Descriptive analysis, factor analysis, cluster analysis and ANOVA were applied to the data gathered. Results revealed that the novelty seeking scale has two-dimensional structure, and academician cultural tourist have very high level of novelty seeking tendency. Moreover, it is determined that academician cultural tourist could be clustered as medium, high and very high novelty seekers, and there are differences between these clusters especially in terms of foreign destination choice.