A CURRENT SNAPSHOT OF TOURIST ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIORS TOWARDS LAO PDR
Abstract
Motivated by a desire to fill an empirical gap studying how the tourists form of their attitudes and behaviors towards Lao PDR, through representative cities Vientiane and Luang Prabang, this research thus is initiated. The research focuses particularly on the cognitive and affective aspects of the destination images, and studies how they influence tourist satisfaction and further onto response behaviors such as recommendation to others. The study incorporates many demographic variables but they show no significant differences. The study confirms the significant roles of both the cognitive and affective attributes of destination images on tourist satisfaction, which in turn predicts recommendation of the destination to others. Nevertheless, this study shows that tourist satisfaction is not able to make tourists form positive revisit intention, which also shares the tourism and travel competitiveness study by the Economic World Forum (2017), with Laos ranked 94 globally.
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