Tourism destination image as an antecedent of destination loyalty: The case of Linz, Austria

Abstract

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.