Emotional Connection, Cognitive Engagement and Post-Experience Behaviours in Religious Site Visits: A Search on Mawlana Museum in Konya, Turkey

1B - Motivation and Experience

This study looks at different motives that tourists experience for their vacations and visit different holiday destinations. Tourist experiences are more than physical travels to places. Therefore, major tourist destinations associate themselves with sacred people e.g. St. Philipius or Virgin Mary, sometimes a Sufi such as Mawlana or Khoja Ahmed Yasawi. These associations with the sacred people create emotional connections and cognitive engagements with these destinations. These emotional connections and cognitive engagements in turn lead to destination loyalty. Within this context, this study specifically aims at (1) exploring the effects of religious sites on emotional connections and cognitive engagements, (2) investigating how emotional connections affect tourists’ post experience behaviours, and (3) finding how cognitive engagements affect tourists’ post experience behaviours. The survey was conducted on the visitors to the Mawlana museum in Konya, Turkey between the months of December 2016 and April 2017. The findings show that the emotional connection factors affect the recommended intentions in high rates and the cognitive engagement factors create the re-visit intentions in high rates.