Memorable Tourism Experience in Hot-Air Ballooning: Its Antecedents and Consequences

Hot-air ballooning is considered an activity conducted in rural areas that involves adventure and participants' interactions with the natural environment. A hot-air balloon ride is regarded as a memorable tourism experience. Memorable tourism experiences are argued to be the best predictors of future behaviours. If tourists have a positive perception of the destination country and the destination itself, they are more likely to feel that they will have a memorable tourism experience, which in turn leads to higher revisit and recommendation intentions. Empirical research investigating the antecedents and consequences of memorable tourism experiences remains insufficient. This study, leveraging the Theory of Planned Behaviour and focusing on hot-air ballooning, aims to fill this gap by proposing and testing a model that explores the relationships between country image, destination image, memorable tourism experience, revisit intention, and recommendation intention. The relationships were examined using PLS-SEM. Data were collected from foreign tourists participating in hot-air balloon tours in Cappadocia, Türkiye, one of the leading destinations for hot-air ballooning in the world (N=764). According to the regression analysis results, country image has a strong positive effect on destination image (β = 0.86, t = 71.976, p < 0.01). Additionally, the country image positively influences memorable tourism experience (β = 0.34, t = 7.018, p < 0.01). Destination image also has a positive impact on memorable tourism experience (β = 0.60, t = 12.951, p < 0.01). Furthermore, destination image mediates the effect of country image on memorable tourism experience (β = 0.52, t = 12.684, p < 0.01). Finally, a memorable tourism experience has a strong positive effect on future behavioural intentions (β = 0.89, t = 66.672, p < 0.01). It is emphasized that in destinations recognized for hot-air ballooning, such as Cappadocia, creating a positive country and destination image can enhance the likelihood of tourists revisiting and recommending the destination to others. In this context, when developing marketing strategies, the impact of the country’s image on destination image should be considered, and the focus should be on providing tourists with memorable experiences. Since convenience sampling method was used in the data collection process in this study, it is an exploratory study, and the generalizability of the results is limited.