A text-analysis approach of push and pull motivations in heritage festivals. Evidence from three Italian cases

Festivals are gaining an increasing relevance in the tourism sector (Getz, 2008), testified by a constant development of the offering, throughout the last thirty years (e.g., Gursoy, Spangenberg, and Rutherford 2006; Yang, Gu, and Cen 2011; Mason and Paggiaro 2012; Akhoondnejad 2016). Festivals have been also long recognized as a very effective tool for the sustainable development of entire regions (e.g., enhancing social cohesion and pride of local communities, see Saleh and Ryan 1993; Getz, 2008; Grappi and Montanari 2011; Lee 2014). Given this raising importance, marketing and tourism literature has increasingly focused on exploring festival contexts; visitors’ motivations have received considerable attention (e.g., Xiang & Petrick 2006; Lee et al. 2004). This work contributes to the debate on festival visitors’ motivation, by applying the push/pull factors framework to the specific context of small, local heritage festivals. A multiple case study is presented. Two contributions are provided: first, by exploring how the push/pull framework works for small, local heritage festivals, pointing out the actual relevance of the cultural and the location (pull) factors over more subjective, inner visitor motives (push); secondly, text analysis approaches have been used as research tools, developing an original framework of analysis.