Examining the Effect of Destination Image on Satisfaction and Behavioral Intentions in Health Tourism (Case Study: Lavij Spa)

Nowadays tourism is as an inspiring industry especially when it comes to health tourism which is generally associated with tourist's soul and body. Destination image is a factor that many tourists use for selecting their destinations and this image is important on health their satisfaction and behavioral intentions.
Tourism is a driving force for enhancing regional development and successful tourism can increase government revenue, as well create jobs. It is quite important to attract tourists so that they would visit again or recommend the places they visited to others (Ranjbarian, 1385). Moreover, image destination is a factor that many tourists pay attention when choosing the place that they want to visit (Ranjbarian, 1385). Having the right knowledge and attitude toward tourist destination is also important. The destination image, however, is the most debatable topic in marketing research in tourism industry. Because of this, many countries use global and promotional marketing tools to improve their image and compete with other destinations. This concept in the field of tourism is very important because it affects the behavior and decisions of tourists and has an important role in the satisfaction level of travel (Martin and Diamond, 2004). The destination image is one of the favorite topics in tourism marketing because it is an essential element in creating and managing a distinct and attractive image of destinations. Several studies that have been done in the past two decades about tourism showed that destination image is a valuable and important concept in the study of the process of choosing a particular destination and has helped our understanding of the behavior of tourists (Balglue and McCleary 1999) . Among various types of tourism, health tourism and its subsidiaries are given crucial attention and because of this attention they show a rapid growth among various kinds of tourism (Garcia, 2006). Despite numerous studies on the subject of tourist destination image in recent decades, this is a relatively new topic in Iran, especially in Mazandaran. According to some previous research, the impact of destination image on satisfaction level of tourists was studied. The current research is done in Lavij spa.
Lavij tourists who use spa constituted the statistical population of this study. 384 tourists were selected as the sample of the research. Tools used for this study were questionnaires and SPSS 18& AMOS18 software for the analysis of research.
Discussion and The results showed a positive relationship between destination image with trip quality and perceived value, trip quality with perceived value and satisfaction, perceived value with satisfaction and behavioral intentions and satisfaction with behavioral intentions.
Conclusion :Building a good image of destination can give health tourists a sense of satisfaction and increase the likelihood of future visits. Therefore, it is recommended that proper attention is paid to image destination for the management tourist intake.