Open AccessTourism destination image as an antecedent of destination loyalty: The case of Linz, Austria
Author(s) -
Elitza Iordanova-Krasteva
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
european journal of tourism research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.467
H-Index - 16
eISSN - 1314-0817
pISSN - 1994-7658
DOI - 10.54055/ejtr.v16i.286
Subject(s) - loyalty , destination image , tourism , advertising , marketing , order (exchange) , antecedent (behavioral psychology) , loyalty business model , linkage (software) , destinations , psychology , business , social psychology , political science , service (business) , biochemistry , chemistry , finance , service quality , gene , law
The concepts of destination image and tourists’ loyalty are sufficiently discussed in the literature; however, due to the multi-dimensional character of these two concepts, the existing studies fail to shed light on the multifaceted linkage between destination image and loyalty. This research displays an innovative way of measuring tourists’ loyalty by creating a composite loyalty index that represents both behavioural and attitudinal loyalty. The index allows for a distinction between different levels of tourists loyalty to be made in order to establish the impact of both cognitive and affective destination image dimensions on loyalty. The findings reveal that the better the image, the higher the composite loyalty. Specifically, destination’s affective image is more influential on tourists’ loyalty than destination’s cognitive image.