The Grass is Greener on the Other Side: What Motivates Backpackers to Leave Home and Why They Choose New Zealand as a Destination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research explores why backpackers decide to leave home and why they choose New Zealand specifically as a destination. While there has been some prior research focusing on backpacker motivations, very little has looked at both the backpacker‘s decision to leave home and his/her destination choice. Furthermore, almost no previous research has looked at both aspects together within a New Zealand context. New Zealand is a popular backpacker destination and has a well-established backpacker industry. This makes the findings of this research relevant for the academic literature and for New Zealand‘s backpacker industry and the tourism industry more generally. \n \nIn this research backpackers were defined as young, long-term budget travellers who emphasise socialising and interacting with locals and other travellers. They travel independently and have flexible itineraries. Semi-structured in-depth interviews with fourteen backpackers were carried out in Queenstown in the South Island of New Zealand in August 2010. The backpackers were aged between nineteen and thirty-four years of age with five coming from England, three from Ireland, two from Canada and one each from Wales, France, Germany and the Netherlands. \n \nSix main themes emerged from the interviews to explain why backpackers choose to leave home and go backpacking. The first two relate to the desire to explore the wider world and meet new people; backpackers travel in order to have experiences unavailable at home. The third factor that emerged from the interviews relates to self-development and identity formation and this reflects the findings of previous research. While not necessarily a conscious motivating factor, the backpackers interviewed alluded to a desire for cultural capital. Many of the backpackers had been wanting to travel for a long time and often the decision to go backpacking was related to a lack of commitments at home coinciding with the availability of both time and money with which to travel. \n \nThree main themes emerged from the interviews to explain why backpackers specifically choose New Zealand as a destination. Overwhelmingly, the main motivating factor for coming to New Zealand related to the country‘s scenic landscapes. New Zealand is a highly recommended destination and all but one of the backpackers had friends and/or family who had previously visited the country. New Zealand is an extremely popular backpacker destination and the idea of a round-the-world ―backpacker route‖ including Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and the United States was mentioned by several interview participants. For some of the backpackers interviewed there was no specific reason to come to New Zealand except that it was perceived as a must-see backpacker destination. Somewhat surprisingly, neither Maori culture nor adventure tourism was found to be a motivating factor for backpackers to come to New Zealand. \n \nThis thesis concludes by emphasising the implications of these research findings for both the academic literature and the New Zealand tourism industry. Suggestions are made regarding issues within backpacker tourism that require further research – particularly those relating to how backpacking is changing and developing in the twenty-first century.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".