Abstract
Samarkand, Uzbekistan is a relatively unknown but emerging tourism destination. The city was once a major trading hub along the Great Silk Road. The once great city of Samarkand was hidden from the world tourism market, only to emerge after the country gained its independence in 1991. Since then, the artistically beautiful and historically-rich monuments have been attracting tourists from around the world. However, Samarkand has not been gaining much research attention at the same rate as international tourist arrivals. Thus, this study aims to comprehensively assess the city’s destination attributes and their impact on international visitor loyalty behaviors. The literature review process identified 16 destination attribute dimensions. Additionally, cognitive and affective evaluation, satisfaction, revisit intention, and word-of-mouth intention were identified and added to form the study model. A total of 223 international tourist samples were collected in Samarkand to validate the proposed model. The findings revealed 10 attributes to be consistently rated by the samples. Subsequently, the attributes were significantly influencing all subsequent hypothesized relationships. Both theoretical and practical implications are also discussed.
Highlights
Uzbekistan can proudly profess a millennia’s old historical heritage, and a long pilgrimage tourism history, the modern development of its tourism industry is relatively young when compared to other countries [1,2,3]
This is because Uzbekistan only started to develop and promote its own tourism industry after the country gained its independence in 1991 [2]
There is the need to consider Samarkand’s distinctive attributes and verify them using the most current samples of international tourists. This present research project aims to contribute to the research pool by comprehensively assessing the dimensions of tourism attributes of Samarkand and their impact on tourist loyalty
Summary
Uzbekistan can proudly profess a millennia’s old historical heritage, and a long pilgrimage tourism history, the modern development of its tourism industry is relatively young when compared to other countries [1,2,3]. There is a lack of available research on the destination attributes of Samarkand. There is the need to consider Samarkand’s distinctive attributes and verify them using the most current samples of international tourists As a result, this present research project aims to contribute to the research pool by comprehensively assessing the dimensions of tourism attributes of Samarkand and their impact on tourist loyalty. The dimensions of destination attributes relevant to the current tourism conditions of Samarkand would be identified via a thorough review of the literature.
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