Willingness to pay more: The quest for superstar museums

Abstract

Museum managers constantly focus their efforts on gaining economic viability. This has become a key challenge as the offer of ‘experience economy’ attractions is increasingly rising and visitors are searching for experiences that are competitive. Although it has been stated that a picture paints a thousand words, the main objective of this research is determining if the relationship between museum image and visitors’ satisfaction significantly and positively influences their willingness to pay more. Partial least analysis was used to conduct the multi-group comparison by including the recently developed measurement invariance of composites (micom) and new permutation methods. A total of 529 valid responses of museum visitors were obtained. Interestingly, the findings showed that there were no significant differences between the two museum samples, and that all the relationships analysed were positive and significant. Interestingly, Henseler’s mga identified a slight difference between the two museum visitor samples in the linkage between visitors’ satisfaction and visitors’ word of mouth. This research proposes a multi-group comparison study examining two different samples of visitors to two superstar Mexican museums so that findings provide useful generalizations that imply academic and managerial contributions for the tourism industry.