An Examination of Destination Competitiveness and Tourist Experience from the International Tourists' Perspective: The Implications for International Tourist Advocacy towards the Destination

Abstract

This thesis investigates the relationship of destination competitiveness and tourist experience in the destination advocacy building process. A conceptual framework was developed to examine the model relationships, which was validated with the empirical data set. This study aims to demonstrate the causal relationships of destination competitiveness (core resources, supporting resources, destination management, and situational conditions), tourist experience (cognitive, affective and behavioral experience), tourist trust, and tourist satisfaction (cognitive and affective satisfaction) on destination advocacy in the international tourism context. With reference the research results, destination advocacy are strongly affected by consistent tourist perspective factors.

Three research objectives were derived to guide the entire research and examine how the important concepts in the destination advocacy building process. The first objective was to investigate the conceptualizations of destination competitiveness, tourist experience, tourist trust, satisfaction, and destination advocacy. And the study also focuses on the link between the antecedents and destination advocacy. The second objective is to develop instruments and validate the data-collection instrument of destination competitiveness (core resources, supporting resources, destination management, and situational conditions), tourist experience (cognitive, affective, and behavioral experience), tourist trust, tourist satisfaction (cognitive and affective satisfaction), and destination advocacy. And the third objective is to contribute to the body of knowledge on destination advocacy through a theoretical contribution of this research and provide the practical implications to international tourist destinations.

Measurement development is one of the major objectives and research contributions of this study. A quantitative approach was used to achieve this objective. The developed instrument based on literature reviews and preliminary verification by three relevant experts in tourism field, and the quantitative methods were questionnaire survey and construct analysis. The collected data was analyzed by using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). A measurement scales were finalized by employing 15 items to measure 4 dimensions of destination competitiveness, 11 items to measure 3 dimensions of tourist experience, 7 items of tourist trust, 8 items to measure 2 dimensions of tourist satisfaction, and 5 items of destination advocacy. Thus, the developed measurement could contribute to theoretical implications.

The data was collected from 603 international tourists and analyzed by Structural Equation Modeling analysis (SEM). The structural model was used to assess the hypothesized relationships between latent variables for achieving the first objective of this study. Two exogenous variables consist of destination competitiveness and tourist experience. A full construct model was tested and then simplified by dropping insignificant causal relationships for reducing the model complexity. Most of the time, the simplified model showed a better fit than the full model. Thus, the simplified overall structural model was achieved and used for hypotheses testing.

This study contributes to the theoretical advancement by connecting the destination attributes and tourist perspective during the destination advocacy building stage. This result identified the major antecedents influencing destination advocacy, which accounted a strong total variance. Destination advocacy was directly affected by destination competitiveness, tourist experience, tourist trust, and tourist satisfaction. Tourist experience was the most necessary factor influencing destination advocacy. Finally, tourist trust and satisfaction were tested as the mediators between the relationships of destination competitiveness, tourist experience and destination advocacy. The results revealed that both tourist trust and satisfaction partially mediated the relationships between the independent variables and dependent variable. The findings were interpreted in the relation to the previous studies and social background. Based on the present study, the practical implications and the theoretical contributions were presented to the destination operators and the academic researchers. The limitations of the results were discussed and the important recommendations were provided for future study.

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