Attendees’ motivation attending festival: the case of Malaysia International Shoe Festival 2016 / Fatin Zulaikha Zulkifli, Nor Syafikah Yahya and Nor Athirah Kamaruzaman

Festivals and events found as a concept of special interest context that has contributed significantly to tourism, travel, leisure and recreation, and lodging industries recently by becoming tourism demand generating factor. Apart from that, festival is an important way that able to provide social, economic, environmental goals and beneficial for the societies and destinations. Festivals and events are one of the attention attractions of destination that provide tourists with updated information about culture, arts, society and history. They also are seen as unique tourist attractions and destination image makers with a variety of other special events. All these kind of festivals are playing major role in contributing developments of the cities by making them to be well-known cities worldwide, together that contributes in country’s revenue itself. The aim of this research is to investigate the underlying dimensions of motivation for attending international festival with regard to different product offering, in specific, shoe. Plus, the second objective of the research is that, to understand how festival attendees perceive the shoe festival with different festival attendee groups. Overall, the study examines how the motivations are related in the context of attending shoe festival that nurtures the Malaysia’s position as a tourist destination that will be focusing on leisure and business tourism around the world. A self-administered questionnaire was designed for the purpose of this study. Samples of 96 respondents that visit Malaysia International Shoe Festival (MISF 2016) were taken and the survey was conducted in Putra World Trade Centre (PWTC), Kuala Lumpur. The results show that there were significant differences in motivation among attendees from shoe festival products.