Destination Image and Tourist Delight with Moderating Role of Travel Attributes: Evidence from Khyber Pakhtunkhuwa, Pakistan

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the relationship of destination image on tourist delight with moderating effect of the travel attributes included, affordability and accessibility on the above relationship. This study is related with the mountain tourism and targets different tourist destinations of Khyber Pakhtunkhuwa Pakistan. Data is collected through questionnaires and stratified convenient sampling technique is use to select the sample. This sample is a comprised respondent from three main regions/strata which consists of the Malakand division, the Mansehra division, and the Galiyat region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to analyze the causal relationship between variables of the study on Smart PLS 4 because Smart PLS is a robust application for analyzing the complex model with several constructs and structural paths without enforcing distributional assumptions on the data. This study evaluates the strong relationship between destination image and tourist delight and founds insignificant effect of moderating variable. Although, this research focuses on mountain tourism in Pakistan. The future studies can be conduct on other types of tourism such as sports tourism, cultural tourism, shopping tourism and religious tourism etc. Moreover, variables used in this study may also be investigated in future research endeavors. This study will provide a broad picture of the tourist delight concept and literature will demonstrate more information on tourist delight. Oliver’s theory of tourist delight and Gartner’s destination image theory is adopted for theoretical support.