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Introduction
When people decide to travel for leisure, there are various destinations to choose from. According to destination choice-sets models (Crompton, 1992; Sirakaya and Woodside, 2005; Um and Crompton, 1990), choosing a travel destination is a funnel-like process where tourists narrow down their choices among hundreds of destinations within their awareness set (destinations a tourist is aware of). During the early stages of this destination selection process, tourists will not only eliminate unfavorable destinations but more importantly, will not even consider destinations they are unaware of. Therefore, it is essential for destinations to be in people’s choice-sets if they want to be considered a potential travel destination. If there is a negative image or even no perceived image of a destination, the chances of being visited are highly limited.
Within the USA, the state of Alabama has to compete with 49 other states as a travel destination. According to the Alabama Tourism Department (2017), tourism is the state’s number one industry with more than 25.8 million visitors in 2016 (2.6 percent increase from 2015), spending over $13.3 billion in Alabama (5.4 percent increase from 2015), and helping to provide more than 179,644 direct and indirect jobs (2.3 percent increase from 2015) for Alabama families. However, Alabama is not one of the top 25 states/territories being visited (National Travel and Tourism Office, 2017). The state of Alabama has many natural resources, heritage attractions, and man-made attractions to offer. People that are familiar with the state are aware of the variety of locally grown foods, the many offerings in terms of outdoor activities, the beautiful landscape, and Southern hospitality. The low ranking in terms of visitation is assumed to be due to the lack of familiarity of the state or negative image of the state to potential travelers. Therefore, it is critical to examine the perceived image and familiarity of Alabama and for destination marketing organizations (DMOs) to act upon the results. The purpose of this study was to investigate the image (cognitive and affective) and familiarity of Alabama as a tourism destination. More specifically, this study examined the difference in perceptions between visitors and non-visitors using quantitative and qualitative data to identify strengths and weaknesses of the image of Alabama.
Previous research relating to tourism in...