Discussion, conclusions and implications
Making tourism destinations appealing and thus competitive is a major priority of destination managers. The literature notes that achieving a higher level of brand equity constitutes a competitive advantage (Pike & Page, 2014). The present work provides a series of contributions that can help to improve the brand equity of a tourist destination. First, the study constitutes an advancement in the CQ literature, particularly from the consumer perspective, and therefore makes a contribution to cross-cultural research based on individual learning and experience (Earley & Ang, 2003; Sahin & Gürbüz, 2014). The majority of works on culture, in particular those in the tourism context, take the perspective of the tourist’s culture of origin, considering culture at the group level (Hofstede et al., 2010). However, CQ shows that the cultural dimensions can be approached from the individual level (Kim, 1994; Triandis, 1994; Yamaguchi et al., 1995). Since the concept was first defined (Ang et al., 2007), CQ has undergone an extensive process of validation, and the research finds that it is generalizable across different fields (Ang et al., 2007; Kim, Kirkman & Chen, 2008; Shannon & Begley, 2008). Given the importance of the CQ construct, a number of authors have contributed to developing a theoretical framework that is better articulated for each of its four dimensions (Van Dyne et al., 2012). It is with this intention that the present study tests the applicability of consumer CQ, which to date has scarcely been used within the tourism context. The works that do examine issues relevant to this perspective have focused on perceptions of services (Malhotra et al., 1994) and, in the tourism sector, service provider CQ (Rohmetra & Arora, 2012), not that of the consumer. Unlike previous studies that analyze the influence of some of the dimensions of CQ, principally on intercultural adjustment (Ang et al., 2004, 2007; Chen et al., 2014; Lee & Sukoco, 2010), the present work demonstrates that all four facets of CQ (Ang et al., 2006; Earley & Ang, 2003) among tourists can be measured, namely the metacognitive, cognitive, motivational and behavioral components. This finding is in line with the literature, indicating that individuals need to possess something of all four facets CQ, rather than only displaying one facet in particular, to be considered culturally intelligent (Earley & Peterson, 2004; Van Dyne et al., 2010).
