Research articleHow destination image and evaluative factors affect behavioral intentions?
Introduction
Tourism has been seen as the driving force for regional development. Successful tourism can increase destination's tourist receipts, income, employment and government revenues. How to attract the tourists to revisit and/or recommend the destination to others is crucial for the success of destination tourism development.
From the perspective of tourist consumption process (Ryan, 2002; Williams & Buswell, 2003), tourist behavior can be divided into three stages: pre-, during- and post-visitation. More specifically, tourist behavior is an aggregate term, which includes pre-visit's decision-making, on-site experience, experience evaluations and post-visit's behavioral intentions and behaviors. It has been generally accepted in the literature that destination image has influence on tourist behaviors (Bigne, Sanchez, & Sanchez, 2001; Fakeye & Crompton, 1991; Lee, Lee, & Lee, 2005). The tourist behaviors include the choice of a destination to visit and subsequent evaluations and future behavioral intention. The subsequent evaluations include the travel experience or perceived trip quality during the stay, perceived value and overall satisfaction while the future behavioral intentions include the intention to revisit and the willingness to recommend. There has been a great body of studies focusing on the interrelationship between quality, satisfaction and behavioral intentions (Backman & Veldkamp, 1995; Baker & Crompton, 2000; Cronin, Brady, & Hult, 2000). However, in recent years perceived value has been emphasized as the object of attention by researchers in tourism (Kashyap & Bojanic, 2000; Murphy, Pritchard, & Smith, 2000; Oh (1999), Oh (2000); Petrick, 2004; Petrick & Backman (2002a), Petrick & Backman (2002b); Petrick, Backman, & Bixler, 1999; Petrick, Morais, & Norman, 2001; Tam, 2000). Some studies even argued that the measurement of satisfaction must be in conjunction with the measure of perceived value (Oh, 2000; Woodruff, 1997) and perceived value plays the moderating role between service quality and satisfaction (Caruana, Money, & Berthon, 2000). Furthermore, perceived value involves the benefits received for the price paid (Zeithaml, 1988) and is a distinctive concept from quality and satisfaction. Empirical research also reveal that the positive impact of perceived value on both future behavioral intentions and behaviors. Hence, perceived value, quality and satisfaction all have been shown to be good predictors of future behavioral intentions (Baker & Crompton, 2000; Bojanic, 1996; Cronin et al., 2000; Petrick, 2004; Tam, 2000).
By understanding the relationships between future behavioral intentions and its determinants, destination tourism managers would better know how to build up an attractive image and improve their marketing efforts to maximize their use of resources. Hence, the purpose of the study is twofold. The first is to construct a more integrated model of tourist consumption process by including destination image and perceived value into the “quality–satisfaction–behavioral intention” paradigm. The second is to examine the relationships between destination image and evaluative factors (i.e. trip quality, perceived value and satisfaction) in their prediction of future behavioral intentions.
Section snippets
Conceptual background and hypotheses
Destination image is defined as an individual's mental representation of knowledge (beliefs), feelings and overall perception of a particular destination (Crompton, 1979; Fakeye & Crompton, 1991). Destination image plays two important roles in behaviors: (1) to influence the destination choice decision-making process and (2) to condition the after-decision-making behaviors including participation (on-site experience), evaluation (satisfaction) and future behavioral intentions (intention to
Questionnaire design
The questionnaire was designed as the survey instrument including all constructs of the proposed model to investigate the hypotheses of interest. The questions in the questionnaire are based on a review of the literature and specific destination characteristics. The survey instrument was revised and finalized based on feedback from five tourism experts and a pilot sample of 25 postgraduate students studying a tourism management program in Taiwan. Hence, the content validity of the survey
Empirical results
In this study a multi-attribute approach was employed to measure destination image and trip quality. As mentioned above, destination image and trip quality were both measured using a 20-item scale. Employing the principal components factor analysis, four factors with an eigenvalue greater than one explained 62.4% of the variance of destination image scale. Six items with factor loading less than 0.5 were removed from the scale. The varimax-rotated factor pattern implies that the first factor
Conclusions
This study investigated the tourist behaviors by constructing a more comprehensive model considering destination image, evaluative factors (i.e. trip quality, perceived value, satisfaction) and behavioral intentions. The structural relationships between all variables in the study were tested using data obtained from a visitor questionnaire survey at Kengtin in southern Taiwan. As Lee et al. (2005) argued, although broad agreement among scholars regarding the influence of destination image on
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Mr. Ting-Yao Wei for his assistance in data collection and the two referees for their comments.
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