Do Satisfied Tourists Really Intend to Come Back? Three Concerns with Empirical Studies of the Link between Satisfaction and Behavioral Intention

By Sara Dolnicar, T. Coltman, Rajeev Sharma. 2015

160 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Explaining human behavior is a primary concern for tourism research and a substantial body of research concludes that highly satisfied tourists are more likely to return to a particular destination. In this article, we provide an analysis of this body of work, arriving at three concerns relating to the strength of association between satisfaction and behavioral intention: (1) the link between constructs is complex, resulting in the frequent omission of causal factors; (2) inconsistency with construct operationalization impedes cumulative knowledge development; and (3) explainable variance is impeded by between-study heterogeneity. We illustrate these problems by analyzing empirical guest survey data and conducting a meta-analysis of published papers in the three top tourism journals between 2002 and 2011. We offer four recommendations for future research investigating the link between satisfaction and behavioral intention.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/247944ba217bd60c2b70cddcc6e3d2246fc9b321

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. S. Wagner
2. Tanja Hörtnagl
3. Girish Prayag
4. Birgit Muskat
5. Hailin Qu
6. C. Ryan
7. Pimtong Tavitiyaman

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Girish Prayag
2. D. Stylidis
3. K. Woosnam
4. Amir Shani
5. Yaniv Belhassen
6. Hailin Qu
7. C. Ryan
8. Sara Dolnicar

Citations in the corpus

• Perceived quality, authenticity, and price in tourists’ dining experiences: Testing competing models of satisfaction and behavioral intentions (2019, background): “Although Dolnicar et al. (2015) challenged the link between satisfaction and behavioral intentions, the majority of researches confirms the positive link between a satisfied tourist and positive behavioral intentions (Prayag et al., 2017; Zabkar et al., 2010).”