Sustainable tourism has been a popular topic in tourism research. However, there are limited studies on tourists’ perspectives from the angle of sustainable tourism. This research intends to develop and test a destination loyalty model which introduces destination image in the form of the pillars of sustainability. Questionnaires were distributed to tourists at five tourist destinations in Shanghai. The analysis showed that tourist satisfaction fully mediated the effect of cultural image and partially mediated the effects of socioeconomic and environmental images on destination loyalty. Implications were derived from the findings and future research recommendations were proposed.

There has been an increase in research on sustainable urban development, especially in recent years, and importance-performance analysis (IPA) is one of the popular methods applied in sustainable development research. However, few have integrated IPA with structural equation modelling (SEM). This study developed and tested an integrated IPA and SEM approach to measuring the effects of the perceived importance of sustainable city dimensions and the perceived performance of a city on resident satisfaction and loyalty. A total of 388 survey responses were collected from the residents of Shanghai and analyzed using the integrated IPA-SEM approach. The results show that resident satisfaction mediates the relationship between overall perceived performance and resident loyalty, while the relationship between overall perceived importance and resident loyalty is mediated by both overall perceived performance and resident satisfaction. The findings from the SEM are in line with the IPA’s concept in that, to ensure resident satisfaction and loyalty, the quadrant that requires the most attention is Q1, while Q2 stands as the target quadrant. Implications and future research directions are proposed based on the findings.

Sustainable urban development has been a popular subject in urban studies and related disciplines. Owing to the challenges faced by cities worldwide to accommodate the growing urban populations, it is becoming ever more important for innovative research on sustainable urban development to be performed to help cities achieve sustainability. This study develops and tests an integrated approach to sustainable city assessment, which is a combination of importance-performance analysis (IPA) and modified analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Questionnaires designed following the IPA concept were distributed to residents of three cities. The importance scores from the collected data were factorized and the relative scores of the factors were then converted into pairwise comparisons using a formula developed in this study. The derived criteria weights were applied to the performance scores to evaluate the cities’ relative overall sustainability performance. This approach replaces the AHP’s 1–9 scale with the IPA’s importance rating scale, which is a Likert scale, in the questionnaire. Based on the findings, implications and future research suggestions were provided.