Tourists' perceived value trust and experience towards delight at religious and historical sites in Pakistan

Abstract

Literature from previous studies stated that researchers and tourist organisations have focused too much on tourist satisfaction and consider it as the only strategic tool for organisations to achieve competitive advantage. However, the majority of the researchers argued that satisfied tourists may not be loyal, thus creating doubts about tourist satisfaction and its impact on attracting more tourists. As such, recent researches that focus on tourists' delight have indicated its relevance as a tool for tourism-related entities to gain a competitive advantage by attracting a larger number of tourists. Prior findings suggested little or no significant relationship between the precedents of delight in tourism-related studies. Thus, these issues compel to advance this research and discourse the research gap. Hence, this study evaluates the effect of tourists' perceived value; tourists' perceived trust, and tourists' experience on religious tourist's delight at religious and historical sites in Pakistan. Subsequently, a conceptual framework was proposed by combining previous empirical studies and models, particularly the Stimulus Organism Response Model (SOR) and Expectancy Disconfirmation Theory Model (EDT). The methodology of the study is quantitative in nature and data were collected from 375 religious' tourists from abroad at three religious and historical sites in Pakistan. Smart PLS v.3 software was used to perform Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). Seven hypotheses were developed to be tested, and all were supported. The results of the study disclosed that tourist's trust, value, and experience have a direct and positive effect on tourist's delight. Moreover, the tourist's trust and value also have a positive and direct impact on the tourist's experience. The results also indicate that the tourist's experience has a direct positive effect on tourist's delight. Furthermore, the tourist's experience plays a mediating role between tourist trust, tourist value, and tourist's delight. The results indicated that tourist's experience mediates the relationship between tourist value, tourist trust with tourist's delight. Theoretically, this study contributes by combining aspects from the SOR model, and the EDT model to examine the effect of tourist value, tourist trust on tourist's delight through tourist's experience. Practically, this study implies that the Pakistan tourism department, management of tourist sites, and tour operators need to offer better services to attract a larger number of religious tourists. Delighted tourists will revisit the religious and historical sites of Pakistan due to their religious obligations towards these religious and historical sites. This study can be generalised to benefits other religious and historical sites.