Customer Satisfaction in Tourist Destination: The Case of Tourism Offer in the City of Naples

Abstract

This paper investigates the main elements that can influence customer satisfaction in tourist services, with specific reference to tourism industry. The importance of this topic resides in the fact that tourists’ positive experiences of service, products, and other resources provided by tourism destinations can produce customer retention as well as positive word-of-mouth. Indeed, satisfaction with travel experiences contributes to destination loyalty. The degree of tourists’ loyalty to a destination is reflected in their intentions to revisit the destination and in their recommendations to others. Thus, information about tourists’ loyalty is important to destination marketers and managers in order to sustain destination attractiveness. Although predominant literature has adopted a demand-side perspective, this paper analyses tourist satisfaction according to an overlapping perspective that contemplates both the demand and the offer side where this latter, in the wider meaning, also includes the systemic perspective. More precisely, this paper aims to identify the principle competitive strategies that the variety of stakeholders, cooperating together in a destination, has to implement in order to increase tourist satisfaction and loyalty. Indeed, the point of view of this paper is to understand how destination attributes and services affect the tourist satisfaction. In order to study the link between destination attributes and tourist satisfaction, the paper collects cross-sectional data via questionnaire, from May 2012 to May 2013. The adopted approach allows to individuate the factors that can influence tourist satisfaction, their (positive or negative) direction and their magnitude. This paper uses 14 tourist satisfaction indicators in order to measure the global satisfaction. Furthermore, this study allows to identify the current strengths and weaknesses of the tourist offer. In particular, the study paid attention to the phase of service delivery since it is the time when customer satisfaction is generated. From this study, it comes out that tourist satisfaction depends on a complex process where the role of each actor is fundamental and it must be in tune with all the other ones. Findings show that tourists visiting Naples are not completely satisfied, supporting that Naples has not a clear destination image.