The Bhutan tourist satisfaction index

Abstract

This paper develops an index, which is a single measure based on tourists' perspective for evaluating service attributes that will serve as a summative overall measure of tourist satisfaction in light of the 'new customer satisfaction index for evaluating transit service quality' propounded by Eboli and Mazzulla (2009). Precisely, both new indexes, heterogeneous tourist satisfaction index (HTSI) derived from heterogeneous customer satisfaction index (HCSI) and conventional index, tourist satisfaction index (TSI) derived from customer satisfaction index (CSI) are computed using eight service attributes and their corresponding importance scores. The data has been collected using a structured questionnaire from 3,062 international and regional tourists who visited Bhutan in 2017 covering all seasons. The indexes so computed would be useful both to destination managers and marketers of Bhutan as a broad framework for performance evaluation and reporting, and in particular to the Tourism Council of Bhutan for sound tourism policy formulations.