The Impact of Tourist Mental Image of Tourist Destination on the Value Co-creation by Focusing on the Mediating Role of Destination Love: A Study of Selected Tourist Destinations of Iran

This study aims to explain the role of the tourist image of the tourist destination on destination value co-creation by focusing on the mediating role of destination love. The target statistical population of this study, in the qualitative phase, are tourism industry experts, university professors, and in the quantitative phase, domestic tourists who traveled to Iran's tourist destinations from April 2019 to January 2020. For data collection, the purposive sampling method was used to select tourism destinations. Then, the available non-random sampling method was used to select tourists from selected cities to answer a researcher-made questionnaire. The validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by the professors and experts in the tourism industry using the content validity. The reliability of the research questions was measured using Cronbach's alpha and composite reliability. To analyze the relationship between research constructs, structural equation modeling with a partial least squares approach was used. The results showed that the research model fits the collected data. Furthermore, the findings show that destination image has a positive effect on destination love in two dimensions including cognitive and emotional. Destination love also mediates the relationship between destination image and value co-creation. In addition, based on the findings, cognitive image and emotional image have a positive effect on the value co-creation in the destination. This study improves the mental image of tourists towards Iran's tourism destinations and develops the realm of knowledge about the value co-creation in the tourism industry, which is less seen in previous studies.