Determinants of Tourists’ Destination Loyalty; (With Special Reference to the Sacred Areas at Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka).

Abstract

Tourism has been identified as the major industry to develop the world economy through regional development. Though all the almost countries, use same resources to cater for its tourists, some countries are in higher attraction than others, and it is common for the destinations within the attracted country, some destination are highly attracted than others (Global Tourists 2016). Being aligning to those practices, Sri Lanka is showing a growing tourist attraction year by year continuously. Tourists’ intention to visit to Sri Lanka is aroused by Sri Lanka Tourism promotion, where though more weightage has been kept on world heritage destinations, there is a decreasing trend of tourists’ attraction to cultural areas in Sri Lanka year by year. (Udurawana 2015). This explanatory research study was conducted to identify the determinants a destinationshould have to upgrade the international tourists’ loyalty behavior representing Anuradhapura sacred areas under the discipline of destination marketing. Through the sound literature, seven determinants were identified, as Entertainment, Education, Event and Festival, Attraction, People Trait, Price, and Infrastructure as the independent variable to describe the concept of determinants of destination. Tourists Loyalty was the dependent variable. Population of the study has been identified based on the number of tourists visited Anuradhapura sacred areas in 2017, and 200 tourists selected as a representative sample through convenient sampling technique. Well-developed research questionnaire was facilitated to collect tourists’ data being aligning to three research hypotheses.On the results, H1 was rejected as there was a very poor tourists’ awareness about scared places at Anuradhapura area, in means it revealed that, three places are highly aware by tourists out of thirty-five places located around Anuradhapura.H2 stands to measure demographic factors effect, which was accepted, as whereTourists Country of origin, marital status, Sex, Age category, Income, Occupation, and Religion, are the Geo-demographic factors have shown significant association to vary tourists’ loyalty. Further, form the destinations’ determinants, Attraction, Entertainment, Infrastructure, and People trait, were positively influenced in the model to play with tourists’ loyalty accepting H3, where Entertainment facilities - destination has, gave high contribution towards tourists’ loyalty behavior. Further results of the analysis, says that destinations’ event & festival, and Education facilities are not considerable to effect on tourist loyalty referred to Anuradhapura area. Finally, researcher suggested a comprehensive model to follow for further researchers on destination or experiential marketing discipline, and suggested suitablestrategies’ to develop Anuradhapura as a loyal destination to international tourists.