It is important to pay attention to the motivations of tourists because it grants the planners and policy makers with an insight about the major tourist destinations and their features. In this way, the management of tourism destinations will be able to equip the target market according to tourists’ needs. Knowledge of the motivations and psychological characteristics of tourists and their behavior patterns should be a priority in the programs of those involved in this industry. As a business and service activity, tourism plays an important role in the economic development. Accordingly, the present research aims to identify the motivations of tourists in order to achieve a suitable model for marketing and formulation of strategies to develop the related products desired by tourists in Sulaimani. An analytical-descriptive methodology has been applied in this study. The questionnaire contains 20 items on a 5-point Likert scale. 200 questionnaires were distributed among New Year tourists in Marivan in 2017 from which 170 questionnaires were collected and analyzed. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was used to ensure the reliability of the research tool. The findings have been evaluated by implementing factor analysis on the results of 170 questionnaires to identify tourists’ motivations, and by performing t-test and one-way ANOVA analysis to test the hypotheses. The results show that among the motivations of tourists, four factors explain 57.05% of the total variance of the tested items; of these, cultural-historical and ecotourism-recreation factors have the highest percentage of variance. Also, the results obtained from testing the hypotheses indicate that the significant difference between sex and tourism motivation lies in the purchase factor. Also, the relationship between sex and motivations of tourists is less than 0.05 only in purchase factor. Accordingly, there is a significant difference between men and women regarding purchase while there is no difference between the sexes in the other motivations. Although the reason for making decisions about a touristic travel may be different, since the New Year trips are usually family trips, family members have an understanding about the motivation and goal of their travel. Also, the results of ANOVA test reveal that there is no significant difference between income levels and tourism motivations.
