Tourist loyalty is all about prices, culture and the sun : a multinomial logistic regression of tourists visiting Athens

Abstract

The objective of the paper is to identify the predictive factors of a tourist’s loyalty to the tourist destination of the capital of Greece, Athens. A sample survey was carried out among the members of a random sample of 461 tourists to Athens. The questionnaire included sections about satisfaction from Athens, Image of Athens, Image of Greece, Loyalty to Athens as a destination, Word of Mouth for travelling to Athens, Demographics and questions about intention for repeat tourist visits to Athens. The methods of analyzing the data were I. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) of the Image of Athens and Image of Greece, obtained during a tourist’s visit, respectively. The first (EFA) about Image of Athens revealed three factors: (a) The Natural Environment and Behavior of city’s population towards tourists. (b) Historical Monuments, Weather and the Mediterranean cuisine and (c) Quality of city’s accommodation and other services. The second (EFA) about Image of Greece obtained during a visit revealed two factors (a) Historical Monuments and Culture (b) Natural Environment and Entertainment. II. The sections on Image of Athens and Greece had Cronbach’s Alpha coefficients 0,713 and 0,71 respectively. III. Logistic Regression with Dependent variable: Loyalty of tourist visitor to Athens, which revealed the following statistically significant independent factors which influence positively loyalty to destination: Satisfaction from price of trip, Cleanness of Athens, Prices of products and Services, Historical Monuments and Natural Beauty. Of interest is the second Logistic Regression with dependent variable: Word of Mouth of the repeat visitor to Athens for visiting the city, which revealed two statistically significant independent variables: Satisfaction from price of trip and the Sunny Natural Environment of Athens and Greece. Hence, there is a differentiation in the nature of factors which influence the first-time and the repeat visitor to Athens in his decision to spread the word encouraging the prospective visitors to Athens: The first-time visitor is impressed with the price of the trip, the Historical Monuments and the Sunny natural environment of Athens whereas the repeat visitor considers as more important variables the price of the trip and the Sunny Natural Environment of Athens and Greece generally.