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For tourism, significant research has been conducted in industry‐specific marketing. Basically, the topic of discussion is the effectiveness and efficiency of the marketing of destinations. As marketing segmentation is one of the most critical parts of any marketing strategy, the authors believe that a customer segmentation by motivations via an activity‐based approach will increase the destination's marketing impact. This study aims to backtrack travel motivations from tourist behaviour which can be observed i.e. the activities they performed. The idea is to find out which motivations to target marketingwise that attract tourists who in turn fit the destination's attraction potential, and activity‐offering competencies. In order to test the hypothesis, a contingency analysis was employed using data from the Swiss travel market. By exploiting the linkage between motivations and activities, the authors have found 34 significant activities, 15 of which can be exclusively linked to a traveller motivation.