Analyzing the Factors Affecting the Loyalty of International Tourists to Iran

Aim: Today, tourist destinations need to make tourists more loyal to these destinations in order to market their attractions, services, and products better. In addition to creating a competitive advantage, marketing costs for loyal tourists are much lower than marketing to attract new tourists. The current research was conducted to analyze the behavior of loyalty to the destination and the factors affecting it using the Bayesian network, which is a graph-type network based on the Bayesian theory.Material & Method: The current research is applied in terms of purpose and descriptive-survey in terms of method. The target population of the research was foreign tourists who traveled to Iran in the fall of 2022. A total of 384 questionnaires were distributed, out of which 376 correct questionnaires were collected and analyzed.Finding: The results of the analysis using the Bayesian method have shown that tourist satisfaction is 19%, the feeling of security from traveling to the destination is 11%, the mental image of the destination is 8%, the perceived quality is 7%, the perceived value, the sense of belonging to the destination is 6% each, and familiarity with the tourist destination is 7%. These factors contribute to the improvement of loyalty to the destination.Conclusion: By creating different scenarios, the tourism industry stakeholders can analyze loyalty behavior and the factors affecting it and use the results to create more loyalty and marketing based on making tourists loyal.Innovation: Although many studies have been done in tourism to identify the factors affecting loyalty to the tourist destination, not many studies have been conducted in the field of predicting the level of loyalty of tourists to the destination, as well as the predictive analysis of the most and the least influencing factors on Loyalty has not been done.