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Article
The Customer’s Perspective on the Tourism Destination Brand: A Structural Equation Modeling Study
Maja Konečnik, Mitja Ruzzier
ABSTRACT. This study uses a structural equation modeling technique to verify a theoretically proposed model of a customer’s evaluation of a tourism destination brand. We therefore employed a measure of the customer-based brand equity of a tourism destination and tested it on the case of Austria from the perspectives of German and Croatian tourists. The proposed model consists of four main dimensions; tourism destination awareness, its image and perceived quality as well as the loyalty dimension. To verify and confirm the relationships between the proposed dimensions, a second-order confirmatory factor analysis was performed. The findings indicate that all dimensions are interrelated and important for the customer’s evaluation of a tourism destination. However, image represents the strongest dimension in our proposed model.
KEYWORDS: customer-based brand equity, tourism destination, brand, structural equation modelling, Slovenia.
JEL classification: M31, M39, P2.