The influence of Sofia's destination image on satisfaction, intention to recommend, and post-visit intentions towards Bulgarian products: Does unique image matter?

• Autor(a) principal: Antova, Stanislava Plamenova
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/18619
• topic: Destination image; Unique image; Sofia; Bulgaria; Tourism satisfaction; Intention to recommend; Post-visit intentions; Marketing turístico; Imagem de marca; Comportamento do consumidor -- Consumer behavior; Promoção turística; Satisfação do consumidor; Produto turístico; Sófia; Bulgária

This thesis is studying the destination image of an emerging tourist destination – Sofia, Bulgaria. The city’s number of foreign tourists has increased with 18 per cent in 2017. As destination image has been proven to be an important factor influencing significantly both pre-visit and post-visit intentions, the city is in pressing need to create a strong image in tourists’ minds. Based on previous literature, a conceptual model investigating the relationships between the different components of destination image, tourism satisfaction, intention to recommend, and post-visit intentions towards Bulgarian products was proposed and tested. Destination image was studied with three components – cognitive, affective, and unique. The latter has been often overlooked in previous studies and there is not much clarity about its conceptualization and measurement. This study provides more information about the concept but it also proposes a new method of measuring it through text-mining of user-generated blog posts. A questionnaire was distributed to 314 foreign visitors of Sofia. The data analysis methods included descriptive statistics, principal component analysis, and multiple linear regressions. The results reveal that the unique image has a significant influence on all constructs, however, it is the affective which has the strongest impact. Moreover, the traditional affective image has the strongest influence on overall image and tourism satisfaction, which in turns has the strongest impact on traditional word-of-mouth. Cognitive image has influence on all constructs except on electronic word-of-mouth. Finally, post-visit intentions towards Bulgarian products are influenced by all variables, with the exception of tourism satisfaction.