Destination image of Perak: expectation, satisfaction and loyalty among Singaporean tourists / Mohd Faisal Abdul Wahab

Identifying the destination image will assist the tourism marketers to promote their destination competently in the marketplace and it can reveal the destinations’ strengths and weaknesses. Images are significantly influenced the tourists' behavior, starting from mental constructions about destination until the travel decision making process. This study investigates the destination image of Perak from Singaporean tourists’ perspective. It also studies on their expectation towards the image as well as satisfaction and loyalty towards Perak as a tourist destination. Using Perak as contextual setting, 150 Singaporean tourists were successfully been surveyed in this study. In general, findings indicated that Singaporean tourists have slightly disagreed toward most images pertaining to destination in Perak. This study discovered that shopping facilities in Perak has recorded the lowest rating among all images listed while safety condition image made up the highest score. Besides, results also demonstrated that tourists have neutral expectation for most images of destination in Perak which consequently affect their satisfaction and loyalty. Apart from that, image was found significantly affects the expectation formations in tourist mind and loyalty toward destination. Besides, result also revealed the existence of significant expectation effect toward degree of satisfaction and as expected, satisfaction has a great influence toward tourist loyalty. Finally, researcher also put forward some suggestions for future researches and discusses the implications and suitable recommendations for state government and local tourism service providers.