Assessing visitors' place attachment and associated intended behaviours related to tourism attractions

Place attachment, referring to the affective links between people and places, is an important concept linking people, place, and certain place-related phenomena. Central to the role of place attachment in place-related research fields is its ability to explain perceptions and behaviours in people’s interactions with places as a result of affection. Whilst it has been suggested that the concept of place attachment can assist in better understanding visitors’ behaviours in tourism settings, research adopting the concept in tourism is still limited. Only a few studies have touched on place attachment in the context of tourism, among which the two principle topics covered are: (i) local residents’ place attachment towards their tourism-based community and (ii) visitors’ place attachment towards destinations. Research on the former topic is aligned in nature to studies assessing residents’ place attachment to their residential places in environmental psychology, while the latter topic, which focuses on a unique type of place attachment, requires much more academic attention.\ud This thesis addresses the need for further investigation of visitors’ place attachment in tourism settings. Limited studies to date have investigated visitor place attachment exclusively beyond destination level. Given tourism attractions, which serve as destination flagships have been ignored as the primary settings with which to study visitors’ emotional attachments, tourism attractions were chosen to explore whether descriptions of place attachment at the destination level may also apply to visitors’ place attachment perceived at the attraction level. The purpose of the current study was to understand the extent of visitors’ place attachment towards tourism attractions and its associations with the nature of attraction, the characteristics of visitors and their trip patterns, as well as visitors’ behavioural intentions and perceptions