Int. J. Services, Economics and Management, Vol. 9, No. 2, 2018 95 Copyright © 2018 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Neural networks to analyse the incidence of customer satisfaction in their loyalty in a tourist destination Reyner Pérez-Campdesuñer, Alexander Sánchez-Rodríguez*, Gelmar García-Vidal and Rodobaldo Martínez-Vivar Faculty of Administrative Sciences, Universidad UTE, Vía Chone, km 4 1/2, 230103, Santo Domingo, Ecuador Email: reyner.perez@ute.edu.ec Email: alexander.sanchez@ute.edu.ec Email: gelmar.garcia@ute.edu.ec Email: rodobaldo.martinez@ute.edu.ec *Corresponding author Abstract: The relationship between levels of satisfaction experienced and its expression in future projected behaviour is widely addressed in the literature, however in the context of tourism in general and tourist destinations in particular acquires distinctive features that demand further research and deepening in this relationship. This research seeks to deepen this relationship, using techniques such as the analysis of neural networks since it allows identifying hidden relationships among multiple variables when working with large databases. The study was carried out in a tourist destination of sun and beach, allowing first verify the latent variables present in the construct of customer satisfaction and then, through the analysis of neural networks, corroborate that there is a high relationship between levels of satisfaction experienced by tourists and their willingness to return and recommend the destination or willingness to discredit the destination whenever dissatisfactions are generated, noting that this last relationship was more significant. Likewise, it is identified which attributes of the service have the most influence on each of these decisions, observing that in each of the previous decisions, the attributes influence differently. Keywords: neural networks; customer satisfaction; loyalty; tourist destination. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Pérez-Campdesuñer, R., Sánchez-Rodríguez, A., García-Vidal, G. and Martínez-Vivar, R. (2018) ‘Neural networks to analyse the incidence of customer satisfaction in their loyalty in a tourist destination’, Int. J. Services, Economics and Management, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp.95–110. Biographical notes: Reyner Pérez-Campdesuñer is an Industrial Engineer. He obtained his Doctor in Technical Sciences from the University of Holguin, Cuba. He is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Administrative Sciences at the University UTE, Ecuador. His professional work has been developed in consulting and teaching in various matters related to business sciences, such as quality management, strategic management, among others.