Back on this page, I was writing about wanderlust, and the motivations for why people travel. I believe these motivations are every bit as unique, as the travelers themselves.
However, and despite the very real risk of bleaching all the romance and the wanderlust right out of the question of why people travel, academic research on the psychology of travel, including people’s motivation for travel can be useful, and sometimes even enlightening.
in can be useful to ‘categorizing’ those motivations–academic/scientific research is perfect for this, by the way, so be careful–I also believe it can be useful, on occasion, to, dare I say it: categorize the reasons why people travel, and also to categorize the types of travelers themselves.
That is what I will do here, not to limit the stories and discussion, but simply so that I can refer back to these high level categories at various times through this project, ok?
, at a high level, for why people travel, and the type of travels
tanley Plog,1 an early pioneer in the field, classified travellers on a spectrum from ‘allocentric’ to ‘psychocentric’ (later renamed to ‘venturers’ and ‘dependables’).
Allocentric travellers are motivated by adventure; they’re curious, open to new experiences, and more likely to engage in ‘slow travel’ which includes backpacking, road trips, and volunteer travel (‘voluntourism’).
Psychocentric travelers are comparatively risk averse and gravitate to more well-developed (and possibly over-developed) destinations and familiar (i.e. repeat) structured experiences. Most travelers, known as “mid-centrics,” fall somewhere toward the middle of this spectrum between allocentric and psychocentric.