Understanding Female Travelers Who Travel Alone within The Hierarchical Theory of Leisure Constraints

Abstract

In the study; The Hierarchical Theory of Leisure Constraints has been accepted as the framework, has been tried to be used to fill lack of tourism literature by explaining the tourism processes and behaviors of female travelers on a theoretical basis. The reliability and validity analyzes of the Solo Travel Constraint scale used in the study were performed on 862 (501 female and 361 male) participants and the general reliability of the scale was found to be very high as cronbach alpha=0.902. Research findings were limited to female participants. As a result of the factor analysis, the variables were gathered under 5 factors (internal constraints, domestic destination qualities, time and cost, foreign destination qualities and interpersonal constraints) with a total explained variance of 60,928%. According to the findings obtained from the research, it was concluded that the average of “internal restrictions” is “weak”, the average of “domestic destination qualifications” is “weak”, the average of “time and cost” is “medium”, the average of “international destination qualifications” is “weak” and the average of “interpersonal restrictions” is “weak” for the participants. The results of the research show that women generally need to be empowered, supported and encouraged to participate in solo travels, and that impose different responsibilities on decision makers, practitioners and academics.