**1. Introduction**

Travelling further from home amidst unfamiliar surroundings is driven by the desire to see more and to gain more experience [21]. The distance can have positive and negative influences [10, 23] dependent upon the travel characteristics and individuals [27]. According to the World Tourism Organization (UNTWO) [33], the number of international tourist

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© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons

arrivals in 2015 increased by 4.6% (1180 million worldwide), an increase of 52 million over the previous year. It was the sixth consecutive year of above-average growth in international tourism following the 2009 global crisis [32]. Asia, for example, recorded close to 6% growth in international tourist arrivals. Tourist arrivals have seen growth from 25 million in 1950 to 1.087 billion in 2013 and expected to reach over 1.8 billion in the year of 2030 [32]. According to UNTWO [32], study of motivation of tourists to visit another country, rising economies have become more critical through the fact that their market share increased from 30% in 1980 to 47% in 2013 and is expected to reach 57% by 2013. Nevertheless, based on previous researches on travel motivations [19, 25, 36] in Malaysia, the study elaborated on travel motivations of overall international tourists rather than focused on long-haul tourists.

International tourist arrival markets, particularly in the Asian and Southeast Asian regions, are more focused on short-haul tourists than long-haul tourists. The tourism markets in Thailand, for example, received short-haul tourists rather than long-haul tourists. Based on the statistics issued in 2009 [8], Thailand received 21,345,482 short-haul tourists compared to 8,160,880 long-haul tourists (statistics based on the arrival of 25 major markets to Thailand). Likewise, Singapore received short-haul tourists as much as 9,645,346 compared to 3,711,783 long-haul tourists (statistics based on the arrival of 15 major markets to Singapore) [28]. Malaysia also faced the same issue with the arrival of 23,393,445 shorthaul tourists compared to 1,987,545 long-haul tourists (statistics based on the arrival of 15 major markets to Malaysia) [30]. The Penang Institute or SERI [26] said the major tourist markets to Penang in 2014 were from short-haul markets from Indonesia (41.1%) and Singapore (20.4%), compared to long-haul countries, for example, Japan (4.5%), the United States (3.1%), Australia (2.8%) and others. Meanwhile, for tourist entries in 2015 (January– October), only 19.92% (155,263) were long-haul arrivals in Penang compared to 80.08% (779,245) of short-haul tourists [13]. The study was conducted to identify the motivations that affected the long-haul travel by international tourists to Penang and will indirectly fill the gap of long-haul travel studies for the state.
