Why do tourists revisit a destination? The key roles of destination brand love / Saurabh Gupta, Priyanka, and Onkar Nath Mishra

Includes bibliographical references (pages 291-292).

The concept of brand love, which originated in marketing, is increasingly being investigated in the field of tourism studies (Hegner et al., 2017). Bagozzi et al. (2017) defined brand love as the feelings of ardent attachment towards a brand by the consumers. Despite having immense implications attracting and retaining tourists, this concept has not been adequately studied in the tourism discipline (Shafiee et al., 2021). Destination brand love is influenced by various brand attributes such as brand identity, brand awareness, brand image, and brand attractiveness (Aro et al., 2018). Previous studies suggest that brand identity is a critical antecedent for successful destination brand (Aro et al., 2018; Shafiee et al., 2021). Researchers have examined the impact of destination image on destination attachment and found a significant positive relationship between the two (Amaro et al., 2020; Aro et al., 2018). Tomigová et al. (2016) suggest that destination attractiveness can be understood in light of the resources available to the tourists at the selected destination and how far they meet their expectations in terms of availability and affordability. It significantly influences the destination loyalty, leading to destination brand love (Kaufmann et al., 2016). Huang (2017) examined the brand love and brand loyalty relationships. He proposed that destination brand love leads to destination brand loyalty. Revisit intention of tourist can be predicted by destination brand loyalty. Amaro et al. (2020) found that destination brand love is a significant predictor of tourist’s revisit intention. The concept of destination brand love has immense importance in the contemporary tourism scenario. First, due to the ongoing COVID pandemic and second, the scanty literature on this concept. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the role of destination brand love on tourist’s revisit intention. Why tourists come to love a certain destination and revisit it generates a lot of curiosity among tourism researchers. This study is an attempt to answer this posited question by examining the role of destination brand love.