Creative tourism and visitor motivation

Abstract Creative tourism has been explained as a new genre of tourism that offers the visitor an opportunity to develop their creative potential through an engaged experience in the destination visited. Despite a growing literature on the topic, little attention has been given to examining what motivates creative tourists to visit particular places and events. This paper aims to address this research gap by applying the push‐pull framework to investigate the travel motivations of creative tourists. To do so, the responsive interviewing model was employed to survey 20 of such tourists who had visited creative spaces and spectacles in three of China's UNESCO‐designated creative cities. Through a qualitative thematic analysis of the transcribed interviews, a new push‐pull framework is introduced to conceptualise the travel motivations of creative tourists. Our paper concludes with practical considerations for destination managers seeking to design and market creative tourism experiences.