Abstract

To better understand tourists’ development of place attachment and its impact on loyalty, this study aims to develop a tourist behavioral model, with a mediating role of place attachment fitting a tourism-specific activity setting. It has been found that tourist involvement indirectly influences destination loyalty through place attachment. While the hypothesis that tourist involvement directly affects destination loyalty is not supported, the comparisons among the major source markets of Korea suggest that for most origin countries, attraction and place identity are the most significant dimensions of the antecedents of loyalty. For Chinese tourists, social bonding is found to be the most substantial dimension of place attachment. This study is the first attempt to incorporate place attachment as a mediator between tourist involvement and destination loyalty by using a second-order structural equation model.