A Survey of the Effective Factors on Tourism Destination Brand Image and its Impact on the Behavior of Domestic Tourists (A Case Study of Qazvin)

Lack of appropriate destination images of many Iranian cities are habitually led many domestic trips toward a few destinations. The historic city of Qazvin is an example of this concern¡ in spite of its high potential in attraction of tourists and the expansion tourism industry. From this view of point¡ the current paper is aimed to investigate the influence of brand associations on the destination image of Qazvin among domestic tourists regarding to the tourism destinations branding issue. Exploratory factor analysis¡ confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were applied to test the hypothesis. The results suggest that unique image and affective image have positive influences on the overall image of Qazvin¡ while the cognitive image has not significant relations with the overall image. The findings also confirm that the overall image has played a mediating role in showing the impact of unique image and affective image on the tourist behavioral intentions. As a result¡ it can be said that the overall image of destination has an important role in doing of the tourists'' upcoming behavior.