Culinary image of Bangladesh and tourists’ travel intention: The impact of visual attention

Focusing on Bangladesh, we investigate how the culinary destination image influences the intention of tourists to visit the country at the pre-travel phase. In addition to the three culinary destination image factors considered by existing studies, we include a fourth factor which captures the cultural heritage and critical traditional festivals of Bangladesh, which could attract tourists. We employ eye-tracking measures with a survey to understand the potential travelers’ attention to tourism visuals, the effect of a culinary destination image on travelers’ intention to visit the destination and whether this influence differs across ethnic groups in the pre-trip phase. The eye-tracking technique allows us to obtain data on fixation duration, fixation count, and patterns of saccades. We then employ suitable statistical methods to analyze the data. We make three crucial findings which far-reaching implications: (i) increase in the four culinary destination images factors of Bangladesh – food, dining, food activities and culture is associated with an increase in the probability of visiting the destination. (ii) Culinary tourists fixate more on food while non-culinary tourists fixate more on cultural activities. (iii) Westerners have a strong preference for food, while Asians are lovers of cultural events. These results point to the need for tourism marketers in Bangladesh to segment tourists into different categories based on their preferences and ethnicities and reach each group with appropriate advertising strategies.