The influence of satisfaction on loyalty and customer relationship quality on satisfaction and destination image: Chabahar port tourists, Iran

Abstract

Tourism has experienced a continuous growth in recent decades. Modern tourism has become a driving force for regional development and has included an increasing number of new tourist destinations. The present article seeks to investigate the effect of tourism experience on loyalty with respect to the mediating role of satisfaction, quality of customer relationship and image of destination. This is an applied survey research and descriptive in terms of methodology. The statistical population includes individuals who have traveled at least three times for the purpose of tourism inside and outside the country during the year and since the number of these people were high; the convenience sampling was used to collect the data. After distributing 384 questionnaires among the statistical population, 373 questionnaires were collected, and the obtained data were analyzed. Results of the analyses of the data using Structural Equation Modeling and Partial Least Squares method suggested significant and positive effect of experience on satisfaction, loyalty on destination, loyalty on ecotourism and image of destination. Furthermore, results suggested a significant and positive effect of destination image on destination loyalty, loyalty to ecotourism and satisfaction, satisfaction on customer relationship quality, loyalty to destination and to ecotourism, while the effect of satisfaction on loyalty to ecotourism was not confirmed.