**7. Discussion**

Long-haul tourists to Penang are younger, graduated and professional, and travel with partners. Results from previous studies and findings from this study showed that most of the long-haul tourists are first-time tourists and are involved with multiple destinations. Other than that, long-haul trip involves longer trip durations, the tourists tend to explore more during the trips to find new thrills and excitement and also because of the 'once in a life time' opportunity. Long-haul travel characteristics based on the findings are quite similar with that of backpacking tourists, with focus on low expenditures, stay at guesthouses and travel to multiple destinations; this is supported by Bao and McKercher's [2] work that state that longhaul tourists do engage in the backpacking style of travel. The main factor of internal motivations (push factors) of long-haul travel is 'novelty and knowledge seeking', while external motivation (pull motivation) is 'culture and heritage'. Long-haul tourists tended to find and explore new things outside of their comfort zone, looking for new challenges and delving into different kinds of cultural heritage and history.

Findings from the relationships between socio-demographic, trip characteristics and motivations (push and pull factor) indicate that long-haul travellers to Penang relish exploring different experiences with their daily lives based on novelty and knowledge seeking. It also constituted part of the dream they want to achieve and at the same time they can share their experience with family and friends. Long-haul tourists also visited famous attractions to experience first-hand the cultural and historical offerings that differ from their culture. Longhaul travel is further related to psychological attitudes and desires [35–37] and is difficult to assess the different kind of attitudes and needs of tourists. This study however, can indirectly help tourism marketers to plan and develop new strategies and policies to attract long-haul tourists especially to Penang and Malaysia, which could be based on their demand (sociodemographics and travel characteristics) and supply (motivation) issues as revealed by the findings.
