Online promotion and its influence on destination awareness and loyalty in the tourism industry

Internet is commonly accepted as an important aspect in successful tourism promotion as well as destination marketing in this era. The main aim of this study is to explore how online promotion and its influence on destination awareness and loyalty in the tourism industry. This study proposes a structural model of the relationships among online promotion (OP), destination awareness (DA), tourist satisfaction (TS) and destination loyalty (DL). Randomly-selected respondents from the population of international tourists departing from Vietnamese international airports were selected as the questionnaire samples in the study. Initially, the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was performed to test the validity of constructs, and the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), using AMOS, was used to test the significance of the proposed hypothesizes model. The results show that the relationships among OP, DA, TS and DL appear significant in this study. The result also indicates that online promotion could improve the destination loyalty. Finally, the academic contribution, implications of the findings for tourism marketers and limitation are also discussed in this study.