The Effect Of Tourist Engagement On Destination Loyalty

The concept of consumer engagement(CE) is attracting increasing attention from both practitioners and academics in part owing to the growth of the Internet as an effective platform for customer interaction and the development of service dominant logic paradigm and the expansion of the relationship marketing theory. Many researchers and practitioners observe that engagement as a new important variable is able to promote consumer loyalty and plays an important role in enhancing organization competitive advantage. Whereas, current researches on consumer engagement and its effects on consumer loyaty is relatively rare. Furthermore, empirical inquiry on tourist engagement(TE) is relatively scarce. As tourism and hospitality firms have widely adopted customer engagement strategies for managing touristdestinations relationships, further understanding of this concept and the mechanism of engagement affecting loyalty is essential.Using the literature research, the concept of the engagement in tourism domain has been well defined and dimensions of engagement have been identified based on the previous consumer engagement knowledge. Then, a theoretical model of the mechanism of tourist engagement affecting destination loyalty is constructed according to regulatory fit theory and relevant empirical results. The model is tested empirically by sampling visitors from Phoenix Town, Hunan province. The results shows: first, TE is consisted of five dimensions(i.e. identification, attention, Enthusiasm, absorption, social interaction). Second, tourist engagement is the antecedent of perceived value. Third, tourist engagement was proved to have a direct positive effect on destination loyalty. Fourth, function value, emotional value was found to have moderating effect on the relationship between TE and destination satisfaction, loyalty. Fifth, destination satisfaction has significant positive influence on destination loyalty. The study also provided managerial implications for destination marketers based on the research results. Destination marketers are advised to implement engagement marketing strategy, customer value-oriented Management strategy and make great efforts to improve tourists’ satisfaction.