Factors influencing lodging intention in rural area in Taiwan

Rural tourism market place is becoming more highly competitive. Developing the competitive strategy, however, is a challenging task for many marketers because the rural tourism is changing dramatically in the face of fierce competition, increasing customer sophistication and rapid technological advances. How to enhance tourists’ revisit intention for marketers have become more and more critical. This study aimed at investigating the potential role of marketers’ relationship quality in influencing tourists’ revisit intentions. Questionnaire survey was employed to collect the data. This study is constructed on the basis of scales adopted in large part from previous studies, using existing scales for measuring destination image, relationship quality and revisit intentions. Random sampling was adapted at the main sites of Hengchun peninsula, the bottom of Taiwan. Principal component analysis (PCA) using VARIMAX rotation was conducted for the total sample to test the dimensionality of the destination image, relationship quality and revisit intention constructs. Cronbach’s alpha was adopted to confirm the reliability of constructs. The regression analysis, finally, was adopted to test the hypotheses. The findings showed that destination image could split into two factors named leisure experience and culture experience and the results of factor analysis revealed the loadings were higher than 0.7 and each item of constructs only loaded in one factor indicating the adequate validity of constructs were met. The Cronbach’s alpha all exceeded 0.7 indicating the measure of the items were reliable. Furthermore, relationship quality is more effective than destination image when predicting tourists’ revisit intentions in rural tourism context. Some more implications, such as hoteliers should concern more about psychological continuum and entertainment of destination image were suggested here with.