A country's image as tourist destination for external intermediaries

Oana Vicol and Adriana Zait
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Oana Vicol: University Alexandru Ioan Cuza, Iaşi, România

Management & Marketing, 2014, vol. 9, issue 1

Abstract: Destination image is an important variable of influence for tourist behavior. Previous studies showed that intermediaries – different travel agencies ‐ influence the visiting intentions of potential tourists, being able to form opinions and shape behaviors. Measuring the perception of travel agencies and other intermediaries about the tourist image of a destination country becomes really important. Reliable and valid measurement instruments are necessary. The vast majority of previous studies used instruments developed for individual tourists, and they do not offer details about how the measurement instruments were obtained. Our objective was to show how one can build an appropriate instrument for intermediaries; the main contribution of our study lays in the scrutiny and rigor of the instrument development process. We performed an instrumental research, on five stages: documentary research through literature review, exploratory research for general and specific attributes, initial questionnaire design based on the first two stages, questionnaire testing on experts and reliability checking on a pilot study. Both qualitative (content analysis and expert ranking) and quantitative (reliability tests) methods of analysis were used. The final instrument obtained is presented in the conclusions section and could be used to estimate external intermediaries’ attitude towards a destination country. The main implications are methodological – the whole scale development procedure can be used in order to build and test similar research instruments.

Keywords: country image; tourist destination; scale validation; instrumental research; travel agencies. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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