The identification of satisfaction drivers of vacation traveling tourists

Abstract

Tourist satisfaction is an important component in management and marketing of tourism destinations and companies which perform their business activity within the tourism sector. Managing customer satisfaction is necessary in order to secure a long-term tourism development within destinations and profitable business of tourism companies in the long-term. Tourism is a complex business area and vacation traveling tourists use a great number of different services. Different services influence tourist satisfaction. The analysis within the paper considers the basic groups of services used by tourists before traveling and services used during traveling in order to determine their influence on satisfaction. The analysis has been performed based on empirical research and the usage of statistical analyses, such as confirmative factor analysis, SEM (structural equation modeling) analysis and t test for two independent samples. Service used by travellers before traveling and during traveling have been regarded separately. The analysis has been performed with vacation traveling tourists and the ones using services of tourism agencies. The selection of this category of tourists has been made in order for the analysis to encompass all the services from the moment of traveling decision making until the return from the voyage. Based on the analysis key satisfaction drivers have been identified. The paper also analyzes the difference between tourism satisfaction drivers of tourists which have used the service of the traveling agency for the first time and the tourists which have used these services mutiple times up to now.