When destinations feel like me: How feeling at one with a destination encourages revisit intention

In an increasingly crowded tourism market, functional differentiation rarely secures enduring advantage. Destination personality research has established that symbolic fit relates to tourist responses, yet current knowledge still offers an incomplete account of how a destination that feels identity-consistent becomes one that visitors intend to revisit. Drawing on cognitive appraisal theory, this study develops and tests a sequential model in which destination personality predicts actual and ideal self-congruity, which, in turn, relate to revisit intention through memorable tourism experiences and place attachment. Survey data from 470 domestic visitors to Quanzhou, a world heritage city in China, were analyzed with partial least squares structural equation modeling, with visit frequency included as a control variable. Findings reveal that destination personality positively predicts actual and ideal self-congruity. Both congruity forms, in turn, relate positively to memorable tourism experiences and place attachment. Memorable tourism experiences also relate positively to place attachment, with both constructs relating positively to revisit intention. Indirect and serial indirect effects are significant across both congruity routes. Formal pairwise comparisons based on bootstrapped difference distributions reveal that ideal self-congruity shows stronger associations than actual self-congruity for the upstream path from destination personality and on the pathways involving memorable tourism experiences, whereas the contrasts that bypass memorable tourism experiences are not significant, which suggests that aspirational identity is most strongly associated with the stage where experiences are interpreted and retained. Measurement invariance testing and permutation-based multi-group analysis reveal no significant differences between first-time and repeat visitors across these pathways, which supports the stability of the findings across visitor segments. These insights advance destination branding research by showing that the association between symbolic fit and revisit intention is consistent with a process in which visitors experience that fit as memorable and consolidate such meaning into attachment.