An Investigation of the Role of Tourist Image in Encouraging the Potential Tourists in Traveling to Shiraz

The tourismindustry is of such a great importance to both the developing and developedcountries that a good deal of investment and planning is devoted to it. Morestudies should be done in this industry for the development and improvement oftourism at national and trans-national levels(ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COMMISSIONFOR ASIA AND THE PACIFIC, 2007: 4). Based on the statistics and reports,it has been presented by theWorldTourism Organization (WTO) in 2012that about 450 million tourists have traveledin May and August 2011 (WTO, 2012). Many authors believe that thedevelopmentofthetourism industry needs thecooperation and coordination of differentenvironmental, cultural, economic, political, and social factors (Getz, 2002: 775), (Amirtahmasb, 2008: 20). On the other hand, there are several factorsinfluencingthe tourists’ decision about traveling to a destination. Word of mouth, which is one of the effective factors in the decisions that tourists make abouttraveling to a certain destination, is defined as the informal information thatevery tourist receives from his/her relatives, family members, friends, andcolleagues. This is why the present study attempts to study the effects of the wordof mouth communications on the tourists’ traveling decision. Materials and This study is practically goal-orientedand is a descriptive survey study in terms of methodology.One hundred tourists havebeenselected as sample members. In order to collect the research data, aquestionnaire with 25 items has been used. Thereliability and validity of thisquestionnaire has been also examined and confirmed by the previous research,however,theauthors in this study examined thereliability and validity. The SPSS is themain statistical software that has been used by authors for analyzing theresearch data and testing the hypotheses. Discussion andThe results of thestudy revealed that wordof mouth is an effective factor inthe tourists’ decisionabouttraveling to atourism destination. Based on this finding, it can be said that the presentactual tourists who travel to Iran can be considered as the main source ofencouraging potential tourists for traveling to Iran, especially Shiraz. Also, the results indicated that the expertknowledge and the similarity of the source of informationare the two mainfactors in using word of mouth communication. In other words, the tourists whouse word of mouth communicationsas the main source of information for travelingpayattention to the expertise and similarity.Alsothe analysis of the demographicfeatures revealed that age and educationare the two main effective factors intheuse of word of mouth the source traveling information. In other words,theelderly and the less educated touristsuse word of mouth communication more thanothers. Also, the results of this study revealed that female tourists use wordof mouth communications more than males. Conclusions; As the results of our study demonstrated, word of mouth communication influences the tourists’ decision about travelingto a destination. Therefore, it can be said that the tourists present in Irancan be considered as the main sources of advertisementforthetourismdestination among potential tourists. The results also indicated that the PerceivedSpecialty andthe Perceived Similarity are the two main factors in using word ofmouth communication. In other words, the tourists who use word of mouthcommunications as the main source of information for traveling pay attention tothe Perceived Specialty and Similarity. On the other hand, the results revealedthat age, gender, and educationare the main effective factors in the use ofword of mouth as the source of information. The results of this study aresupported by many studies that have been done in this area across the world. Itcan be suggested based on the findings of our study that offering good servicesthetourists who have been to the tourism destination before can encourage them toadvertise the tourism destination among potential tourists. On the other hand, it can be suggested that the expertise and similarity of the source ofinformation have a great role in encouraging the tourists to travel to acertain tourism destination.