Visitors at Heritage Sites: From the Motivation to Visit to the Genesis of Destination Affective Loyalty

The last years, the context of heritage sites and cultural tourism registered a boost in interest from the destination loyalty researchers. Although the importance of visitors' experience at heritage sites, the events, and the role of reenactment in steering the effects of visitors was previously acknowledged and properly stress in literature, previous models did not account for the manner how tourist develop their destination loyalty to heritage sites renowned for their reenactment festival or performances. We have surveyed 258 visitors of 20 heritage sites hosting reenactment performances in Romania. Based on descriptive, qualitative analysis and regression analysis emerged the importance of how tourists experience the various different attributes of these destinations and their particular motivation to visit and form their destination loyalty. The results confirmed the importance of place attachment components as antecedents of destination loyalty also on this context. In the case of heritage, sites strongly connected with national identity, variables like affective attachment, place identity, the strength of visitor’s national identification and the destination’s identification as a reenactment destination could explain near half of the variance of the visitors’ affective loyalty for the destination. In addition, the visitors’ level of affective loyalty, place identity and independent motivation to visit registered on these sites, was slightly higher. In the case of heritage sites less connected with the national historiography, the strength of identification of the respective destination as a reenactment destination, or the motivation to visit exclusively for reenactment, were higher than in the case of the previous sites.