Factors Affecting Tourist Destination Choice: A Survey of International Travelers to Hanoi, Vietnam

Abstract:The study enhances tourism destinations’ competitiveness from the tourist’s perspective. Departing from the concept of customer-based brand equity (Keller, 1993; Aaker, 1991), our purpose is to construct a linkage between customer-based brand equity for a tourism destination (destination image, destination awareness, quality of destination and destination loyalty) and behavioral intentions for selecting a tourist destination (revisit and/or recommendation to other people), in order to better understand the role of tourism destination branding. This paper carried out a survey of international tourists who selected Hanoi - Vietnam as their holiday destination and our findings show that brand image and brand loyalty play an important role on tourist’s decision of returning or recommendation to others while brand awareness and quality have no impact.