High-low level features of destination personality: A four-stage validation study

Research on destination branding has shown that tourists perceive destinations as having a personality structured around three dimensions (exciting, genuine, convivial). We offer a list of destination features likely to constitute the basis of the inferences individuals consensually make about those dimensions. We validated these associations in four empirical stages. Stage 1 assessed the tourist destination features that participants associate with each personality dimension. Stage 2 reverted the process, evaluating whether those features are perceived as instantiations of their original dimension. Stage 3 described the level of diagnosticity they are thus perceived. Stage 4 examined whether cities scoring high or low in each of the dimensions are perceived to have the corresponding assessed features. Our results provide validity to the list of destination-features consensually associated with each destination personality dimension. The practical relevance of these results is discussed, alongside their contribution to understanding destination personality inference processes, enabling interventions to improve tourist destination perceptions.