The Importance Of Loyality In Tourism

Food is the utmost elements in the tourism sector that acts as a sense of place attraction among travelers (Bessiere, 1998; Cohen & Avieli, 2004; Ryu & Jang, 2006; Seo, Kim, Oh, & Yun, 2013) who seeks for unusual or extraordinary food experience and new culture which they could not acquire from their own place. A tourism destination could be popularized because of the specialty cuisines it serves the people. This is obviously being observed in European Country such as France and Italy, which are known for their pizza and pasta sensations (Henderson, 2009). Tourists tend to involve themselves by tasting the new sensation which they found exciting and fun during their holiday vacation. They spend almost half of the expenditure on food and drinks …show more content…
According to Sondoh, Omar, Wahid, Ishak & Harun (2007), attitudinal loyalty is known as “stated preferences, commitment or purchase intentions of the customers" (Mellens, Dekimpe, & Steenkamp, 1996), whereas behavioral loyalty is explained as the frequency of repeat buying or proportion of purchase. Next, the third approach is a composite approach which illuminates the combination of both attitudinal and behavioral to enhance the understanding of loyalty definition (Sondoh et al., 2007). On the other side, for a travel destination perspective, revisiting and recommendation to others are perceived to be linked to behavioral loyalty (Yoon & Uysal, 2005). This was also being supported by Opperman (2000) that claims tourists’ experience at a destination as a product, then their level of loyalty can be reflected through behavioral intention of revisiting the destination and recommend those experiences to friends and relatives. Meanwhile, doValle, Silva, Mendes, & Guerreiro (2006) added that research on tourists’ Intentional Loyalty is beneficial for both marketing and management team in the tourism industry in order to retain the loyal tourists as they contributed to economic value and therefore the intentional loyalty study among tourists has been investigated since 1990s (Zhang et al., 2014; Dimanche & Havitz, 1994) until nowadays. Besides, Um, Chon, & Ro (2006), Petrick (2004) and doValle et al. (2006) also found that, a tourism destination could maximize its profit by impending the reliable loyal tourists through repeat visitation. Hence, the elements of repurchase intention and revisit intention were employed to predict tourists’ Intentional Loyalty behavior (Yoon & Uysal, 2005) in this