There has been a substantial rise in the number of Chinese tourists, with the Chinese millennials being important influencers. Yet very little is known about their tourism behavior, particularly how their perceived destination brand values influence their destination loyalty. This study brings in the consumers’ perceived brand value concept from the branding literature to investigate Chinese millennial tourists’ destination loyalty. An online survey was adopted to collect data from 287 Chinese millennial tourists. The findings offer insight into the relative effects of five dimensions of tourists’ perceived destination brand values on their destination loyalty. The findings also extend existing tourism literature, showing the moderating effects of destination brand globality, destination status (domestic vs international) and national brand attitude on the said relationships. Managerial implications to better target Chinese millennials are discussed together with future research directions.

Introduction

The tourism industry has enjoyed dynamic and continuous growth in the past two decades and has become one of the fastest growing sectors in economic development worldwide (UNWTO, 2016). Recently, the number of international tourist arrivals reached 1186 million in 2015, reflecting a market size of US1260 billion (UNWTO, 2016). Recognizing the importance of tourism, existing studies on tourist destinations have tended to work from the perspective of destination image (e.g., Chen & Tsai, 2007; Chon, 1992). Only recently, the tourist destination literature has begun to explore elements of branding, focusing particularly on the development of strong destination brands (Lin, 2015). With increased competition between various destinations, branding appears to be an important tool to distinguish between different destinations that share similar characteristics (Stepchenkova & Li, 2014). Despite the growing importance of destination branding, extant research tends to focus on means to effectively communicate brand message (Ooi, 2004), explaining how destination image influences destination branding (Prebensen, 2007) in relation to destination characteristics (Gnoth, 2007). However, the investigation of destination branding from consumers’ perceived brand value perspective remains sparse and inadequate. Partial understanding of the influence of consumer brand equity on destination brand loyalty can be obtained from the work of Boo, Busser, and Baloglu (2009). However, the relationship between consumers’ perceived brand value of a destination and tourists’ destination loyalty remains unexplained. Whilst extant branding literature suggests that consumers’ perceived brand value is one of the most influential concepts to investigate consumer behaviors, predicting loyalty, and behavioral intention (Cronin, Brady, & Hult, 2000), the application of consumer perceived value in influencing tourists’ behaviors is under researched. To address this literature gap, this study proposes to expand on the current understanding of destination branding by merging branding and tourism literature to explain the effects of consumer brand value on tourists’ destination loyalty. Furthermore, from tourists’ perspective, destinations differ in globality, e.g., how global a city is perceived in their eyes (Halkias, Davvetas, & Diamantopoulos, 2016), and status (whether a destination is regarded as domestic or international) because resources required (e.g., time, mode of transportation, and cost) for domestic travel are different to those for international travel (Balli, Balli, & Cebeci, 2013; Pike & Ryan, 2004).