Motives for attending the Cultivaria Arts Festival

15 January 2013

Festivals are becoming a key feature on the tourism calendar of many towns and cities. Cultivaria is one of South Africa’s newest arts festivals and is held at Paarl annually. The festival is one combining the arts, wine and food. The purpose of this research is to determine the reasons (motives) for visitors attending the festival. This information is needed so that a marketing plan can be developed, as well as to be able to ensure that visitors’ needs are fulfilled. In order to do this, the organisers’ need to know the reasons why people attend the festival. In order to achieve the goal of the research, a survey (N=450) was conducted where 409 questionnaires were successfully retrieved for use in a factor analysis. The results showed the three main motives for attendance were the event attraction, cultural exploration and escape. Escape was found to be the main motive, which contradicted similar research done in other parts of the world. The results also indicated that, even though Cultivaria is an Afrikaans-language festival, language did not play a significant role as a motivator to the event. This contradicted similar research conducted at Aardklop National Arts Festival, also primarily an Afrikaans-language festival. From the results, recommendations are made that will contribute to a more sustainable event.