This study set out to investigate the impacts of cognitive and emotional destination image on tourists' emotions, satisfaction, and future selection of destination, as well as to establish theoretical relationships among them.
Total 760 questionnaires...
This study set out to investigate the impacts of cognitive and emotional destination image on tourists' emotions, satisfaction, and future selection of destination, as well as to establish theoretical relationships among them.
Total 760 questionnaires were distributed to Korean and Philippine tourists for one month from August 1 to 31. Out of 760, 743 were collected on the field and 720 were used for final analysis except for 23 that didn't fit the purposes due to insincere responses. The Korean tourists contributed 413, while the Philippine ones 307.
The collected data were treated with SPSS 10.1 and LISREL 8.30 program. The empirical analysis led to the following findings:
First, the cognitive destination image had no significant influences on both the Korean tourists' and Philippine tourists' positive emotions. For both the tourist groups, interest and comfortable images they felt during sightseeing were very affective to their positive feelings of the destination. They seemed to consider not only the environment aspect, which was a physical element, but also interest and attractions in choosing a destination.
Second, emotional destination image didn't have significant impacts on the Korean tourists' positive emotions, while it did on the Philippine ones, which proved that the former valued the physical environment of a destination and created emotional feelings of it through the value analysis. Meanwhile, the latter had emotional destination image have significant impacts on their positive emotions in addition to the cognitive one.
Third, both the cognitive and emotional destination image had negative impacts on both the Korean and Philippine tourists' negative emotions. That is, both the groups will feel less negative about a place when they find pleasantness, cleanliness, convenience facilities, and reasonable sightseeing expenses satisfying. At the same time, it's very likely that poor safety and accommodation of a destination will cause tourists to feel negative about it. The findings show it's crucial to strengthen the environmental aspects of a destination. In particular, the Korean tourists were more influenced by the emotional destination image in a negative way than the Philippine ones, which implies that emotional image can be used to decrease a destination's negative feelings that Korean tourists have. It's indirectly clear then that emotional image should be reinforced in order to reduce tourists' negative feelings and to increase their satisfaction and will to revisit.
Fourth, positive emotions of a destination had significant positive impacts on both the Korean and Philippine tourists' satisfaction, while negative ones had negative impacts on them. Since it's proven that a tourist's positive feelings of a destination works to increase his or her satisfaction and that the negative ones to decrease, it's important to reinforce such elements as can help tourists have positive feelings of a destination in order to raise the level of their satisfaction.
Fifth, satisfaction had significant impacts on will to revisit for both the Korean and Philippine tourists, which means that the more satisfied they are at a place, the more likely they will revisit or recommend to others through positive word of mouth. Thus the result affirms that tourist att.' action is only possible through tourist satisfaction.
Sixth, the Korean and Philippine tourists differed in destination image, emotion, satisfaction, and will to revisit, and significant differences were found in interest of destination image and awakening of emotional image. In particular, the interest element was deemed important among the Korean tourists, whose average was high with 3.269, which means that Koreans perceive interest as the strongest element of destination images. Meanwhile, the Philippine tourists considered awakening element of emotional destination images more important than the Korean tourists.