Using nostalgia to increase tourists’ destination loyalty in heritage cities: from imagined to productive nostalgia

Sanghoon Kang, Woo Gon Kim and Sanghoon Lee

International Journal of Urban Sciences, 2025, vol. 29, issue 1, 195-220

Abstract: This study examines how nostalgia influences the relationships between emotional solidarity, tourists’ satisfaction, and destination loyalty in heritage cities. An online survey of tourists in South Korea was administered. Through the data analysis techniques of PLS-SEM, we found that the three dimensions of tourists’ emotional solidarity with local residents, consisted of feeling welcomed, emotional closeness, and sympathetic understanding, are significantly related to satisfaction, but only feeling welcomed is significantly related to destination loyalty. The relationship between emotional solidarity and destination loyalty was mediated by tourists’ satisfaction, which also had a positive association with it. Moreover, the study proposes nostalgia as a moderating factor in these associations, and shows that nostalgia strongly moderated the relationship between emotional solidarity and destination loyalty. The results emphasize how crucial emotional solidarity is for raising tourist satisfaction and loyalty, especially when it comes to feeling welcomed. It has been demonstrated that nostalgia, greatly increases the effect that emotional solidarity has on destination loyalty. The results are discussed through the lens of productive nostalgia, which aims to contribute to the implementation of strategies for sustainable tourism in heritage cities.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/12265934.2025.2452511

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