LAUSR

Abstract Rural tourism in Spain has developed intensively in recent years and although this branch of tourism is now well established, it still faces some challenges that causal marketing research can address. Tourism destinations now must operate in extremely competitive markets, forcing destination managers to seek out innovative strategies and sustainable competitive advantage, including cultivating tourist loyalty. This paper focuses on developing a better understanding of how destination loyalty is generated in rural tourism by identifying factors that contribute to this loyalty. The paper first examines previous theoretical analyses of the importance of loyalty as a sustainable competitive advantage and the capacity of rural tourism destinations to generate tourist loyalty. It then presents a structural model that includes the main antecedents of destination loyalty that are applicable to Spanish rural tourism. Based on a sample of 464 rural tourists and data analysis using the partial least squares technique, the results indicate that image, quality and destination attribute satisfaction are the direct antecedents of rural tourism destination loyalty. The findings also show that these are indirect precursors of loyalty through overall satisfaction.