Abstract
This study aims at contributing to the development of the customer-based brand equity (CBBE) concept in a tourism destination setting by taking into account the value-co-creation approach. The components of the proposed model consist of the customers’ evaluation of the destination promise in terms of transforming tangible, intangible and social destination resources into tourists’ value-in-use. Moreover, destination brand awareness affects the evaluation of the destination promise, which, in turn, determines tourists’ behavioural intentions towards the destination. By implementing a web survey and using a linear structural equation modelling approach, the proposed model is empirically validated for the Swedish mountain destination of Åre. Results particularly show the significant contribution of customer benefits and value for money to create destination loyalty. The paper demonstrates that by monitoring unique destination and tourist-specific experience dimensions, destination management can control both the value-in-use for a customer and customer loyalty, thereby upgrade and evaluate its marketing strategy, and, finally, discover promising innovation potentials for highly experiential tourism products.