Resumen de Rio de Janeiro as a gayfriendly destination: the gay tourists’ perspective
Belem Barbosa, Thiago Moraes, Anabela Rocha
The city of Rio de Janeiro is a well-known tourism destination, and has been recurrently appointed as one of the most gay-friendly destinations in the world (Riotur, 2011; Rossi, 2016). The most recent data from tourists expenditure in Rio de Janeiro (Riotur, 2014) show that LGBT tourists are responsible for a revenue of R$ 400 million and on average spend more during travels than heterosexual tourists. During Carnival, the city tourism revenue surpasses R$ 1,5 billion, and gay tourists are responsible for 30.75% of that amount. Despite very interesting contributions on gay tourism in extant literature, to the best of our knowledge the gay-friendliness of a destination has been disregarded so far.
Destinations known as gay-friendly usually have a high number of gay inhabitants (Hughes, 1997) as well as gay events and venues (Pritchard et al., 1998). Moreover, some destinations develop communication campaigns targeted at gay tourists. Still, word-of-mouth communication is an essential information channel namely because of its high credibility compared to other sources of information. Tourists’ satisfaction is essential to trigger recommendations and revisits, and expected to play a very relevant role in the decision process of gay tourists.
