Abstract

To stand out in the hot spring tourism industry, customer satisfaction has become the crucial issue for competitiveness. A company cannot implement several customer satisfaction improvement practices altogether with limited resources. Researchers advocate that companies should evaluate the relationships among success factors and explore determinants for their improvement implementation. However, such a relationship evaluation has not yet been adequately performed. This paper intends to explore the determinants for improving hot spring customer satisfaction. Adopting grounded theory (GT) and using data collected from websites, Ctrip and Qunar, the first 12 key factors for customer satisfaction were identified. Then, their interrelationships were assessed by 15 experts, and interpretive structural modeling (ISM) was employed to analyze the interrelationships and the driving and dependence power among key factors. The results show that “Environment Quality”, “Special Resource”, “Convenience”, “Food”, Service Quality”, and “Facilities” were the decisive factors affecting customer satisfaction. The findings offer important implications for hot spring management and practice. The contribution of this study is using a novel approach to establish a hierarchical structural model for comprehensive understanding of factor relationships that influence hot spring tourists’ satisfaction and to explore decisive factors which can help hot spring practitioners to better plan and design effective improvement strategies to attract potential new consumers and retain their current consumers, especially with limited resources.

Highlights

  • Hot spring tourism is one of the most popular types of tourism [1], which often attracts thousands of domestic and international travelers to visit annually [2,3]

  • Based on the above discussion, the aim of this research is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the hierarchical model of different success factors in the hot spring tourism context and identify the decisive factors to improve hot spring industry customer satisfaction

  • interpretive structural modeling (ISM) has been applied by a number of researchers in various fields to develop a better understanding of complex systems, such as analyzing vendor selection criteria [76], exploring the factors affecting flexibility in a flexible manufacturing system [77], determining the mutual relationships between the enablers of tourism value [78], and identifying the barriers to the implementation of total productive maintenance [79]

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Summary

Introduction

Hot spring tourism is one of the most popular types of tourism [1], which often attracts thousands of domestic and international travelers to visit annually [2,3]. With the rapid growth of economic and wellness tourism in China, the hot spring tour has become a popular holiday activity. Chinese consumers tend to enjoy holidays in hot spring resorts. In order to raise standards and industry quality to attract foreign visitors, the Chinese government has established a national hot spring committee and regulations related to water quality, safety management, and the rating of “hot springs towns” [4]. The market of hot spring resorts is gradually becoming more saturated with more intense competition. It becomes difficult for the management to distinguish their operations from other market participants in order to increase or maintain their market share if they do not strategically change or improve

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