Destination Familiarity and Perceived Attractiveness of Four Polish Tourism Cities

Abstract

Destination familiarity has been analyzed for many years as an important factor influencing the perceived attractiveness of a destination and its image. However, previous research has concentrated on this relation considering familiarity with a destination as a whole, while the issue of familiarity with particular elements of a destination has not been explored. The current research aimed to detect if and how familiarity with three selected elements of a destination, namely, tangible tourism attractions, events, and traditional cuisine and dishes, impacts the perceived attractiveness of a city destination. The research was conducted using the following four Polish cities as examples: Gdańsk, Katowice, Łódź, and Wrocław. The research questionnaire was distributed among the citizens of another Polish city—Krakow. Over 200 responses were received. The results show that familiarity with tangible attraction was correlated with high perceived attractiveness of a destination, while the other two factors did not impact the level of perceived attractiveness. The results were achieved on the basis of the indication of several scientific and practical conclusions.

The influence of immersion on tourists’ satisfaction via perceived attractiveness and happiness

“…Specifically, destination managers can create new tourism activities and products for tourists to maintain the attractiveness of the destination. This suggestion can be supported by Szubert et al (2021), who found that perceived attractiveness is influenced by destination familiarity. The new tourism activities and products increase tourists’ curiosity about the destination which has the potential to increase their visit or revisit intentions.…”

Attractiveness Assessment Model for Evaluating an Area for a Potential Geopark—Case Study: Hațeg UNESCO Global Geopark (Romania)

“…The variety of data processing methods can be categorized into the following groups: (a) statistical analysis ( 13 Due to the interest of researchers in attractiveness assessment and the variety of methods and techniques (52), we had the opportunity to create a solid database containing a high number of items, which were turned into in a large inventory of criteria; in total, 862 attractiveness attributes were inventoried. Along with the high interest in attractiveness assessment, the diversification of analysis techniques over time (e.g., surveys, statistics, GIS [10,63,64]) has increased the complexity of items finally available to us. The large and complex inventory of items ensures a better quantification of attractiveness in order to come as close as possible to an objective result.…”

“…Tourist attractions are the driving force behind tourists visiting a destination, and are defined by richness of natural and socio-cultural potential with attractive value; others have commonly agreed on tourism attractions [10], tourist resources [11,12], or tourist physical features [13].…”

Advances in Tourism Image and Branding

“…Findings suggest that the sense of presence positively mediates the relationships between holistic images and cognitive, affective and conative components. The second article of this axis by Szubert, Warcholik and Żemła [16] bridges a particular gap in the academic literature by focusing not only on familiarity as a whole, but by decomposing this concept into three elements: (1) tangible tourism attractions, (2) events, and (3) traditional cuisine and dishes. The authors aim to determine how the three types of familiarity impact the perceived attractiveness of a city destination using four Polish tourism cities as case studies.…”