From experience to intention: how tourism operations shape consumer perceptions, brand attitudes, and visiting behaviour in cities

Urban tourism competitiveness increasingly depends on the reliability of everyday operational systems rather than on promotional imagery alone. This study examines how Perceived City Tourism Experience Quality (P-CTEQ) – reflected in evaluations of safety, transport, and leisure infrastructure – shapes City Brand Image (CBI), City Brand Attitude (CBA), and Intention to Visit (IoV). Drawing on the experience-economy perspective and applying the cognition–affect–conation progression of the Theory of Planned Behavior (without modelling its full triadic structure), the study develops a sequential framework explaining how operational experience quality is cognitively encoded into brand beliefs, consolidated into affective orientation, and translated into behavioural intention. Survey data from 379 visitors and prospective visitors to major Indian metropolitan cities were analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling. The findings demonstrate that P-CTEQ influences visitation intention primarily through a layered mediation process (P-CTEQ → CBI → CBA → IoV), indicating that operational excellence becomes behaviourally consequential only after psychological internalisation. By positioning urban operational systems as experiential belief antecedents rather than background service inputs, the study extends city-branding research by clarifying how operational experience quality contributes to image and attitude formation within urban tourism contexts. The results offer actionable implications for urban destination managers, emphasising systemic reliability, cross-departmental coordination, and perception-based evaluation of operational subsystems to strengthen sustainable destination competitiveness.