Antecedents of Tourism Destination Loyalty: The Role of Destination Image, Satisfaction, and Identity Salience: An Abstract

Abstract

The relationship marketing literature shows that identity salience, an important construct from the field of social psychology, can be used to understand consumers’ behavior and loyalty. However, no known research has examined the role of identity salience in the context of tourism destination marketing in relation to some fundamental antecedents of tourism destination loyalty. Therefore, this research proposes and tests a relationship marketing framework in a coastal tourism destination setting, integrating the construct of identity salience with important determinants of destination loyalty drawn from the tourism literature, such as cognitive destination image, affective destination image, and visitor satisfaction. The findings indicate that positive word-of-mouth (WOM) recommendations and intention to return are not only determined by the destination’s perceived image dimensions and visitor satisfaction but also by the degree of tourists’ identity salience, in consistency with the image congruence hypothesis and self-congruence theory. Importantly, the significant effects of visitor satisfaction become nonsignificant when incorporating identity salience, revealing a full mediation effect on WOM and intention to return. This suggests that other attributes of a destination, rather than satisfaction, were the most important determinant of destination loyalty.