Abstract
This paper aims to assess the relationships between tourists’ negative evaluation of key management areas in the cultural city, their overall satisfaction and future intentions. More specifically, this paper proposes a covariance-based structural equations model (CB-SEM) to assess the influence of tourists’ dissatisfaction caused by failures in tourist and cultural services, hygiene and infrastructure on their overall satisfaction with the cultural trip and their intentions to repeat it. Using data collected from 1500 tourists visiting Old Havana on a cultural trip, this paper confirms that a negative opinion on the management of hygiene, cleanliness and crowding is dominant in explaining cultural tourists’ lower levels of satisfaction. In addition, this was found to be the only factor with a negative impact on tourists’ intentions to revisit the city in the future. The results are useful for helping managers of cultural destinations to distinguish the areas that are most relevant in their attempt to promote satisfaction and loyalty in the context of cultural tourism.
Highlights
This study aims to fill this gap by offering insights into the negative feelings of cultural tourists about these features and their relationship with satisfaction and future intentions
It supports previous research proving that higher levels of satisfaction among cultural tourists do not lead to a greater willingness to revisit the cultural destination [8]
The main contributions of this work are that: (i) it provides a better and wider understanding of the behavior of cultural tourists; (ii) it proposes and empirically validates, for the first time, dissatisfaction constructs that have the potential to modify cultural tourists’ overall satisfaction and intentions to revisit destinations, and; (iii) it has proven the dominant role of dissatisfaction with the management of hygiene, cleanliness and crowding in explaining tourists’ satisfaction and intentions to revisit cultural destinations
Summary
Cultural tourism worldwide accounts for over 39% of international tourism arrivals [1], with some 500 million tourists a year [2,3]. Strengthening cultural tourism has a positive effect on those destinations subject to high seasonality [4], since for this particular market segment, the weather conditions of the destination are not a limiting factor. Cultural tourists spend more and stay longer at the destination on average, resulting in a high profitability potential compared to other segments [5]. Cultural tourism stands out as a key sector for the sustainability of many coastal and island destinations that are highly dependent on tourist activity, especially ‘sun, sea and sand’ tourism [1,4]
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