Abstract:

According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, the main problem of Malaysia’s tourism industry is image. As a consequence, Malaysia lags behind other leading competitive destinations in the region in terms of international tourism receipts. This study develops a model to examine the relationships among Destination Image, Customer Satisfaction and Destination Loyalty of tourists. Factor Analysis was used to test the factorial validity of constructs and Structural Equation Modelling was used to test the goodness of the proposed hypothesised model. The empirical results of this study provide tenable evidence that the proposed model is acceptable. The findings indicated that Malaysia was perceived as offering natural scenic beauty supported by good facilities for food and accommodation. The results also show that Destination Image is the antecedent to Tourist Satisfaction which, in turn has an effect on Destination Loyalty.

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