Enduring travel involvement, destination brand equity, and travelers’ visit intentions: A structural model analysis

Abstract

In the highly competitive tourist destination marketplace, destination marketers are constantly looking to enhance their brand equity by focusing on a number of key factors to strengthen their brand values. Because tourists' interests and involvement, adoption and visit intentions are fundamental elements to destination brand building, changes in these elements can serve as predictor variables for understanding the changes in destination demand. This paper examines the relationship among tourists' enduring travel involvement, destination brand equity, and visit intentions during pretrip information search. It was found that customer-based destination brand equity is a combination of key factors that can derive the overall utility that tourists place in the destination brand, some of which are impacted by enduring travel involvement. Furthermore, different facets of destination brand equity have positive impacts on destination visit intentions. This study provides new insights into the theory and practice of travelers' behavior and destination brand equity management. The findings are particularly valuable to destination marketers with direct or indirect responsibility to develop and protect the equity in their destination brands.

Introduction

As the range of tourism choices expand and destinations become increasingly more competitive, more destinations adopted the idea of using a name or symbol to enhance their value. A valid reason for studying brand equity from a strategy-based perspective is that destination marketers can improve their marketing productivity by understanding the destination brand perceived by the consumers. The perceived value can then be developed into profitable brand strategies. Destination brand equity is the combination of key factors that can be described as the overall utility that tourists place in the destination brand when compared to its competitors. A number of practices to enhance the equity in destination brands have been employed, such as building stronger emotional attachment through destination imagery campaigns and destination loyalty programs.

Because people's interests in travel, adoption, and loyalty are fundamental elements to destination brand building, changes in these elements can serve as predictor variables for understanding the changes in destination demand (Lee, 2001). Consumers’ interest and involvement in travel or enduring travel involvement explains their stable and continuing travel preferences, destination choices, and activity participation. Considerable resources are expended on building destination brands, yet the literature is virtually silent on the concept of enduring travel involvement and investigating the impacts of tourists’ involvement in travel on their perceptions of destinations.

This study intends to empirically investigate the relationship among tourists’ enduring travel involvement, destination brand equity, and visit intentions during their pre-trip information search. Taking into consideration that enduring travel involvement and visit intention are both consumer-centered phenomena, destination brand equity is conceptualized and operationalized from the perspective of individual consumers or tourists.