The influence of market heterogeneity on the relationship between a destination's image and tourists' future behaviour

In the past decade, companies and academics have become aware of the great benefits of maintaining a solid base of loyal customers. Such customer loyalty is also important to other entities-such as tourist destinations. Building on the services-marketing literature, the present study develops an innovative model for evaluation of the effect of a destination's image on the loyalty intentions of tourists. The study then explores whether market heterogeneity affects this relationship by performing a latent cluster analysis. Four major clusters of tourists emerge-according to the tourists' need for variety. The results show that there are significant differences among these segments in terms of the effects of a destination's image on tourists' intentions to return to a destination and their intentions to recommend it to friends and relatives. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.