Critical Factors Affecting Selection of Travel Destinations: A Case Study in Vietnam

This study is conducted to fill the research gap in proposing and testing the relationship between “Attitudes about the overall image of the destination”, “Subjective norms” and “Perceived behavioral control”. Simultaneously, we examine the relationship between these variables and tourists’ “intent to choose a destination.”. While most previous studies only deal with the relationship between destination image and intended behavior of tourists, this study uses the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991) to explain the intended behavior of tourists. In addition, the Theory of Destination Image (Echtner & Ritchie, 1991) is used to explain the factor “attitudes about the overall image of the destination”, contribute to supplementing and perfecting the Theory of Planned Behavior. This study uses a Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to analyze a sample of 993 observations, the subjects of which are international tourists to Vietnam, to test the relationship between second-order constructs. The test results show that “Subjective norms” and “Perceived behavioral control” have an impact on “Attitudes about the overall image of the destination”. Moreover, all these three factors have an impact on “Intent to choose destination”, in which the factor “Perceived behavioral control” has the greatest impact on “intention to choose destination”.