Going for gold as a leisure tourism continuum: clustering motivations for gold panning revisit intention

Abstract

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. The way in which people use their spare time differs. Leisure activities and tourism are among the most common of these. Gold panning is a rather unusual niche leisure and tourism activity. Despite some differences, leisure and tourism are generally interrelated in many ways, thus gold panning, is a good example of the leisure tourism continuum. In this study, gold panning is considered as a set of leisure activities within the context of tourism. The aim of the paper is to determine the profile of a gold panner based on their motivations. Therefore, respondents are clustered by means of motivation into two homogenous groups defined as ‘nature seekers’ and ‘true gold panners’. The results suggest that the clusters differ significantly with regards to age, education and marital status, but also in terms of the degree of interest in gold and revisit intention. The originality of the research lies in the fact that gold panning as a leisure activity has seldom been explored under the guise of a leisure and tourist context within existing literature, especially through the means of quantitative research.