The effect of innovation on tourists’ revisit intention toward tourism destinations

Purpose Drawing on Schumpeter’s theory of innovation and stereotype content model, this study aims to arrive at an integrated model that relates destination innovation type, destination innovativeness and revisit intention to uncover more about the drivers and outcomes of destination innovativeness from a consumer-centric perspective. Design/methodology/approach Three studies, including content analysis of news media, an onsite survey and an online survey in Chinese special featured towns, were conducted. Findings This study develops a consumer-centric destination innovation measure. The results reveal that input innovation and product innovation positively influence revisit intention through the serial mediation of destination innovativeness and perceived competence. Research limitations/implications As the data was collected from tourists in China, any generalization of the results to other regions should be made with caution; accordingly, replication is needed to test the proposed model in different cultural contexts. Second, during the onsite data collection period, special featured town destinations were still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, which may have affected the perceptions of tourists. Third, the second round of data was collected using an online survey, which may have introduced bias due to a potential lack of representativeness. Fourth, some potential missing variables could also influence the links among innovation, destination innovativeness and revisit intention. Originality/value This study presents the first empirical test of the impact of innovation type and innovativeness on tourists’ response to tourism destinations. The results of this study could guide destinations to deliver more effective consumer-centric innovations to generate competitiveness.