Structural Equation Model for tourism destination competitiveness from tourists' perception perspectives

Abstract

Previous work of tourism competitiveness has focused more on integrative destinations, such as nations, states (provinces), cities, or destinations having similar attractions. However, appropriate research perspectives and methods havenot been found for evaluating tourism destinations of different types and different sizes.Moreover, early work of Structural Equation Model applied to tourism science has generally limited to a given destination and has rarely compared among different tourism destinations. Therefore, the main thrust of the paper will be concerned with comparing the tourism competitiveness between Jiuzhaigou and Lushan from tourists' perception perspective by applying structural equation model. Based on the Confirmatory Factor Analysis, Cross-validation, and Invariance Measurement, the theoretical model has stability and validity between different samples. Jiuzhaigou has more advantages than Lushan by comparing tourist perception in resources, community attitudes, integral satisfaction and loyalty except service through the Mean Model of Structural Equation. Structural Equation Models, especially Mean structural Model, are applied to and validated in this study, which is a step forward toward the quantitive research methods of destination competitiveness. It is the first time that latent variable of community attitudes has been introduced into the tourist perception model, which is testified to be positively correlated with the tourists' satisfaction and loyalty.