The Applicability of Improvement Gap Analysis to Understand Pre‐ and Post‐Covid‐19 Foreign Tourists’ Satisfaction at a Heritage Destination

Abstract

Tourist satisfaction is one of the most important factors for a destination's perpetual survival. The stakeholders seek to understand how to enhance tourist satisfaction. Prior research highlighted various methods to measure tourist satisfaction, but the use of Improvement Gap Analysis (IGA) has been found more effective in positioning the key destination satisfaction attributes in a grid form. The aim of this study is to analyze the attributes that influence the overall satisfaction of foreign tourists visiting Varanasi, which is a leading tourist destination in India. This study used IGA to distinguish and position 21 destination satisfaction attributes. Further, the statistically significant difference between average expected satisfaction and average current satisfaction is examined using the Wilcoxon signed rank test. The results provide a deeper understanding of the current satisfaction status of a heritage destination, but also provide scope for possible improvements by introducing new attributes. Furthermore, the study identifies critical areas of improvement for the following attributes: “maintenance of historical structures and monuments,” “convenient local transportation,” “sight‐seeing prices in terms of tourist satisfaction” in the context. The attributes used in the study to examine satisfaction of heritage destination can be used in similar contexts and adds knowledge to the existing body of tourism marketing literature.