Examining Relationships among Festival Satisfaction, Place Attachment, Emotional Experience, and Destination Loyalty

Abstract

Current study extended Bowlby's theory to explain how satisfying past experiences will impact place attachment, emotional experiences, loyalty and future behavior. Study modeled the visitors’ festival satisfaction as an antecedent to destination loyalty directly as well as through 3-dimensional construct place attachment (place identity, social bonding, and place dependence) and emotional experience. Measurement and structural models were tested with the help of higher order covariance based structural equation modeling using 394 respondents. Findings revealed that festival satisfaction, place dependence, and emotional experience are significant predictors of destination loyalty by explaining a total 19.60% of variance. Festival satisfaction significantly influenced place identity, social bonding and place dependence. None of the mediating paths were found significant. Gender significantly moderated a few paths in the model such as; festival satisfaction on social bonding, festival satisfaction and place identity, between festival satisfaction and destination loyalty. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed at large.