Abstract
This study aims to apply self-congruity theory to examine the relationship between self-congruity of tourists and their perceived image of a gambling destination. This study employs the Euclidean distance model and extends Malhotra's pars of adjectives with five new items about gambling motives. A face-to-face questionnaire survey was used, and a total of 152 samples were collected from tourists in Macau. The results show that the actual self-image of tourists is more related to their perception of Macau image. For actual congruence, tourists exhibit a greater tendency to match the informal, liberal, and emotional image of Macau. For ideal congruence, they have a tendency to match the contemporary, organized, and pleasant image of Macau. This study makes up for the deficiency of self-congruity theory in tourism research. This study helps tourism departments to develop appropriate strategies to promote gambling tourism and disseminate relevant information that can bring gambling destinations closer to tourists.
Highlights
Tourism, as a form of public leisure, has become the main source of economic income in many tourist destinations (Butowski, 2017)
This study aims to investigate the association between selfimage of tourists and their perceived image of a gambling destination—Macau
This study aims to extend our understanding of self-congruity applied in gambling destination image and empirically examines the relationship between tourists’ self-image and the image of Macau
Summary
As a form of public leisure, has become the main source of economic income in many tourist destinations (Butowski, 2017). Tourist destination image is the sum of tourists’ cognitive and affective evaluations, which plays a positive role in destination marketing (San Martín and Del Bosque, 2008). For a gambling destination, say, Macau, its destination image is something special. Since 2006, Macau’s gambling revenue has surpassed Las Vegas, and Macau became the top gambling destination in the world (Li et al, 2017). Macau is the former Portuguese colony, a small city about 32.9 square kilometers, and homes to 682.5 thousand people by the end of March 2021. For this East-Meets-West old city, Macau has two faces. Most of the tourists returned from Macau are seldom talking about “casino” and “gambling.” ascertaining tourists’ perceived image of Macau is crucial to the development and better adaptation
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