Abstract

Tourists’ expectations regarding a given destination are affected to a certain extent by the destination’s promotional activities. Although tourism destinations have promotional strategies that are put into effect with the goal of increasing the number of visitors, destination promotional failures are inevitable in the tourism industry. Many of the marketing planners in Vietnam tend to encounter difficulties when deciding which promotion tools to employ because they fail to understand tourists’ consumer behaviors. The main purpose of this study is to explore how promotional activities and evaluative factors affect destination loyalty within the tourism industry. This study proposes a structural model of the relationships among promotional activities (PAs), tourist expectations (TEs), tourist satisfaction (TS) and destination loyalty (DL). Randomly selected respondents from the population of international tourists departing from Vietnamese international airports were selected to participate in the questionnaire study. Initially, an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was performed to test the validity of the constructs, and the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), using AMOS, was used to test the significance of the proposed hypothesis model. The results show that the relationships among PA, TE,TS and DL appear significant. The results also indicate that, beside their high expectations regarding a given destination’s features, international tourists seem to be dissatisfied with the services that they received when visiting Vietnam. This dissatisfaction leads to a low level of tourists’ intentions to return to Vietnam. This paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings from the study for tourism marketers.

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