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Introduction
Push and pull motivations are important factors in understanding tourist behaviour, especially in destination choice. There is a large body of studies that have examined tourist motivations based on the push/pull framework; however, very little research work on Muslim/Arab tourist motivations in the push and pull framework has been done. This is surprising, as travel is an important element of the Arab lifestyle (HalalFocus, 2011); Islam endorses travel and leisure considering it to be vital in life (Hashim et al., 2006).
As part of the Arab world, the Middle East is one of the world’s fastest growing tourism generating regions and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a key tourist market in the Middle East (Augustine, 2014; UNWTO, 2012). Tourism Australia expects by 2020 this region to be worth over $1bn in export income and also contribute to the growth in visitor arrivals to Australia (Tourism Queensland, 2014).
Australia is one of the most popular destinations to visit by UAE travellers (Francis, 2016). The UAE travel market ranks as one of the top source markets of visitors to Australia (Sahoo, 2014). The UAE market has a high spending power; it is among the highest travel markets in terms of spending per trip in Australia (Sahoo, 2014), thus making it a very lucrative market to target for Australia (Ali, 2014; Scott and Jafari, 2010). Statistics of the outbound overseas travel, in particular the UAE nationals (Emiratis) to Australia, show an increase from 17 to 21 per cent between 2012 and 2014. There were 157,000 Emiratis who travelled to Australia in 2012 and 214,000 in 2015 (Pan Arab Research Centre, 2015).
The number of the Emiratis travelling to Australia is small due to the fact that there has been little promotion of Australia in the UAE (Tourism Queensland, 2014). This has been acknowledged at the Tourism Events Queensland roadshow held at the Australian Embassy in Abu Dhabi by a spokesperson for Tourism Queensland who stated, “too often we have sat back and relied on word of mouth. Emiratis, for example, go to the Gold Coast during the summer here [UAE] […] take their extended families […] then return the next year […] tell their friends […]”. This shows that promotion of Australian tourism mostly relies...