Destination Personality: Effects on Satisfaction, Identification, Word-of

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items for satisfaction, identification, promoting, and revisit intentions loaded strongly on their corresponding factor (> .6). With respect to the destination personality measures, the analysis revealed five factors with eigenvalues greater than 1. However, the scree test showed a significant dip between the sixth and seventh factor. This indicates that a six factor solution explains the factor structure better. After elimination of items with low factor loadings and significant cross-loadings, a clean factor structure emerged explaining 70.1% of the total variance in destination personality (see Table 1). We then derived meaning from the emergent factors in the context of tourism destinations and labelled them excitement, sophistication, activeness, dependability, philoxenia (a Greek word specific to the tourism industry; it means the opposite of xenophobia), and ruggedness. In order to establish convergent and discriminant validity, we subjected the retained set of items to confirmatory factor analysis and specifically ran two measurement models due to sample size restrictions. The model results show a good fit to the data (see Table 2). Though the chi-square value are significant (χ 2 (60) = 141.52, p < .01), the other fit indices reveal a good fitting model (NFI = .99, NNFI = .99, CFI = .99, RMSEA = .053). We also estimated a second-order model for destination personality (Brakus et al., 2009). The results exhibit an acceptable model fit too (χ 2 (293) = 1029.12, p < .001, NFI = .95, NNFI = .96, CFI = .96, RMSEA = .072). All factor loadings of the items on their posited indicators exceed .58 and the t-values greater than 8.39 (p < .01), thus indicating convergent validity. We assessed discriminant validity through model comparisons with φ freed versus fixed at one for all construct pairs (Gerbing & Anderson, 1988). All ∆χ 2 are significant at the .05 level. Further the variance shared between the latent constructs is lower than the average variance extracted (AVE) for each individual construct, suggesting that the measures are not collinear (Fornell and Larcker, 1981). Table 3 presents the correlations, descriptive statistics, internal consistency estimates, and AVE for the study constructs. We empirically tested for CMB in our data through Harman’s test: we estimated a single latent factor reflected by all the study’s manifest items (Podsakoff et al., 2003). The model statistics show a poor fit to the data (χ 2 (703) = 62330.50, p < .001; NFI= 0.83; NNFI= 0.84; CFI= 0.84; RMSEA= 0.42), suggesting that CMB is not a major issue. We then ran a structural model to test our hypothesised relationships. Given the sample size restrictions, we used composite measures of the six destination personality dimensions (see Brakus et al., 2009). The single-item construct revisit intentions was assumed to have a reliability of .90 for estimation purposes (Anderson & Gerbing, 1988). The model fits the data well (χ 2 (144) = 335.23, p < .001, NFI = .99, NNFI = .99, CFI = .99, RMSEA = .052). Table 4 shows the standardised parameter estimates, t-values, and significance levels for the hypothesised paths. The results suggest that, except for H7, the model links are all significant (p < .01) and in accordance with their respective hypotheses. Overall, the model explains a great amount (more than half) of the observed variance in the endogenous constructs of satisfaction (60%), identification (57%), promoting (57%), and revisit intentions (52%). Discussion The findings reveal that although tourists appear to ascribe distinct personality characteristics to tourism destinations, Aaker’s (1997) penta-factorial brand personality structure is not fully applicable in this case (see also Demirbag Kaplan et al., 2010; Ekinci & Hosany, 2006; Ekinci et al., 2007; Murphy et al., 2007b). In our case, destination personality can be portrayed in terms of the established characteristics excitement, sophistication, and ruggedness and the novel ones activeness, dependability, and philoxenia. The emergence of these tourismspecific personality dimensions is not surprising considering the idiosyncrasies of the tourism product offering, which mainly delivers emotional experiences rather than tangible features. Interestingly, philoxenia has resemblance with the conviviality dimension identified by 4
Hosany et al. (2006). Further, we identified a shift of individual adjectives between personality dimensions relative to Aaker’s (1997) scale. This was also the case in some prior research (e.g., Hosany et al., 2006; Murphy et al., 2007b). The phenomenon can be attributed to brand-adjective interaction; individual words may assume varying meanings depending on the type of product they are assigned to describe (Ekinci & Hosany, 2006). It appears that destination marketers need to consider tourism-specific traits when developing differentiated destination personalities. Clearly, more work is needed to refine and validate a personality framework that is applicable across a wider range of tourism destinations. Further, the results suggest destination personality is not only related to tourist satisfaction and promoting, which is in line with previous research (see Ekinci & Hosany, 2006) but also a prime determinant of revisit intentions. That destination personality encourages tourist–destination identification is an important, fresh finding in the field. Marketers should bear this in mind when trying to craft destination personality and attract congruent market segments. An intriguing result from this study is also what did not work: the direct impact of satisfaction on revisit intentions was not corroborated. While most work in tourism aligns to the general marketing literature and converges to the conclusion that satisfaction results in return intentions (e.g., Chi & Qu, 2008; Um et al., 2006), some studies suggest this link does not always hold (e.g., Bigné et al., 2001). The explanation for this may lie in the additional ramifications of the tourism context: people infrequently purchase vacations and novelty seeking is a key component driving tourist behaviour (Pearce & Kang, 2009). Nevertheless, under no circumstances should destination managers underestimate the importance of tourist satisfaction given (1) its role as chief predictor of tourist–destination identification and promoting and (2) its indirect effects on revisit intentions via identification. Another finding of interest concerns the beneficial outcomes of identification. Tourists with strong psychological attachments to a destination not only intend to revisit, but also serve as goodwill ambassadors. This is of vital importance for destination managers because positive word-of-mouth incurs no expenses and is far more credible and effective than marketer-sourced promotions (Simpson & Siguaw, 2008). Tourism scholars should take note that identification fulfils a self-definitional need and provides tourists with emotional returns (cf. Homburg et al., 2009) and can thus enhance understanding of tourist behaviour. Future studies could incorporate into the present model additional components of consumer behaviour in tourism, such as motivations, normative influence, and self-construal. Also, an important direction for further research is to explore the role of tourist experience in shaping destination personality. It is hoped that this study will inspire further research on the interface between tourists and tourism destinations. Research along these lines is sorely needed. 5
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Page 3: administered questionnaire. A total
Page 7 and 8: Fournier, S. (1998), "Consumer and
Page 9 and 10: Appendices Figure 1: Research model
Page 11 and 12: Table 2: Measurement models Measure
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