When a revenger evolves into a loyal follower: the causes and consequences of revenge travel

Revenge travel is a term that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic describing people’s strong desire to travel, almost as if making up for lost time and missed opportunities. This widely-observed phenomenon is worldwide in the post-COVID-19 era, yet its drivers and outcomes remain unclear. This research primarily examines the underlying framework of destination loyalty among retaliatory outbound tourists in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study drew on the tourist satisfaction and destination loyalty model to develop and test a theoretical framework with two-wave time-lagged data collected from 468 tourists on a target tourism route (China – Thailand). The results of the covariance-based structural equation modelling (CB-SEM) analysis suggest that 1) revenge travel motivations positively impact tourist satisfaction, and improved satisfaction leads to destination loyalty, 2) social media usage, nostalgia, and expectations influence motivations for revenge travel, and 3) destination image and tour quality have varying impacts on tourist satisfaction and destination loyalty and are influenced by social media usage and tourist expectations, respectively. This study provides a unique theoretical contribution to the tourism literature on loyalty. In addition, it offers a new development perspective for the international tourism market in post-pandemic recovery.