THE IMPORTANCE OF COGNITIVE DETERMINANTS IN TOURISM DESTINATION IMAGE FORMATION

Sa？etak The increasingly pronounced global ties, which affect social, economic, political, technological and cultural fields, have left a large imprint on the tourism market. There is growing competitiveness between tourism destinations, which try to find the best development strategy under the newly-arisen conditions. Under contemporary tourism development conditions, a destination must be observed as a basic functional unit that can respond to the demands of the modern tourism market by using its uniqueness and individuality for the creation of new, diversified products based on specific features of certain tourism destinations. The paper analyzes and researches the cognitive determinants that have an influence on the formation of a destination’s positive image, using the case of the Dubrovnik tourism destination. The objective and the purpose of the research is to determine the importance of stimulus factors and sociodemographic characteristics of tourists visiting a holiday destination on image formation, which is a deciding factor in the creation of tourism policies. Empirical research was employed using a questionnaire survey on a sampling of 355 randomly-chosen tourists visiting the Dubrovnik tourism destination. The results obtained by this research indicate a lack of importance of cognitive determinants for an image destination formation