Research Article
RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN SERVICE QUALITY, SERVICE VALUE, EQUITY, SATISFACTION AND BEHAVIOURAL INTENTIONS IN ADVENTURE TOURISM
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Tourism services’ operators keep looking for insights into the perceptions of tourists and relationships between them to formulate operations and marketing related strategies. This paper highlights inter-relationships between Service Quality, Service Value, Perceived Equity, Satisfaction and Behavioral Intentions in Adventure Tourism context based on the primary data collected from the adventure tourists on the basis of multi stage sampling. Correlation coefficients between these constructs have been analyzed to draw inferences.
Keywords: Service Quality, Service Value, Perceived Equity, Satisfaction, Behavioral Intentions, Adventure Tourism.
Tourism services play highly significant role in the tourism sector. According to World Trade Organization (World Trade Organization, 2020), “Tourism and travel-related services include services provided by hotels and restaurants (including catering), travel agencies and tour operator services, tourist guide services and other related services”. Services constitute a majority of the tourism related offerings. Hence, it is important to examine tourism services related constructs and inter-relationships among them for effective decision making in tourism sector. In the services literature, the most wide studied variables are perceived service quality and customer satisfaction. Similarly, there are a large number of studies dealing with the relationships among different variables. To attain competitive advantage, it is important for tourism organizations to understand the perception of tourists towards various services related constructs like service quality, service value, perceived equity, satisfaction and behavioral intentions. Perception of the tourists towards various aspects of
these services influences their satisfaction and future decisions as well. Service quality and service value influence tourists’ satisfaction and subsequently loyalty of tourists. Tourism service providers need to ensure quality of services and service value to elicit tourists’ satisfaction. Satisfaction of tourists will facilitate growth and re-patronage of service providers. This paper has reported the relationships between service quality, service value, perceived equity, customer satisfaction and behavioral intention in the context of adventure tourism based on primary data collection through multi-stage sampling.
Service quality is defined as the ability of an organization to meet or exceed customers' expectations (Parasuraman, Zeithaml & Berry, 1985). It is one of the important constructs which is related with other service evaluation constructs and widely studied. According to (Zeithaml, 1988) “Perceived value is the consumer's overall assessment of the utility of a product based on perceptions of what is received and what is given”. Perceived value is another important service evaluation construct and it has been examined in this paper as well. Cook & Messick (1983) described perception of fairness as the tendency of customers to receive what they deserve i.e. to get output based on their input. Tourists expect to be treated fairly. Perceived equity is another construct which is examined in this paper. Klaus (1985) defined satisfaction as “the customer's subjective evaluation of a consumption experience, based on some relationship between the customer's perceptions and objective attributes of the product”. Satisfaction is being considered to be related with many services related constructs. Consumers’ future behavioral intentions are normally treated as subjective judgements and these helps to predict the futuristic behavior of customers (Chandel, 2015). Intention to return, word-of-mouth, and search for alternatives are behavioral intentions of the tourists which have been examined. Inter-relationships between service value, satisfaction and behavioral intentions have been reported to be significant in adventure tourism and sports contexts (Chandel & Bansal, 2014; Chandel, Bansal & Gattoufi, 2018).
DISCUSSION
Reported results are based on the analysis of primary data collected from 235 adventure tourists through multi-stage sampling in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. This paper has reported correlations between the constructs of service quality, perceived value, perceived equity, satisfaction, intention to return, word-of-mouth and search for alternatives among adventure tourists. Table 1 exhibits inter-construct correlations among these constructs.
Correlation coefficient between service quality and perceived value has been found to be 0.90 and this relationship has been found to be significant with p
been found to be 0.70 and this relationship is significant with p
Correlation coefficient between perceived value and perceived equity has been found to be 0.80 and this relationship is significant with p
Correlation coefficient between perceived equity and satisfaction has been found to be 0.74 and this relationship is significant with p
Correlation coefficient between perceived satisfaction and intention to revisit among adventure tour respondents has been found to be 0.70 and this relationship is significant with p
Correlation coefficient between intention to revisit and word-of-mouth referral has been found to be 0.66 and this relationship is significant with p
Inter construct correlation coefficients for all constructs have been found to be significant at p
CONCLUSION
Inter-relationships between the constructs of service quality, service value, perceived equity, satisfaction, intentions to return, word-of-mouth referrals and search for alternatives have been examined with correlation coefficients and found to be significant at p
Note: This article is based on one part of the doctoral research work of the author.
Chandel, J.K. & Bansal, S.P. (2014). Understanding the relationships of value, satisfaction and behavioral intentions among adventure tourists. International Journal of Leisure and Tourism Marketing 4(2): 156171.
Chandel J.K. (2015). Perception towards tourism services among adventure tourists in himachal pradesh. Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla.
Chandel, J.K., Bansal, S.P. & Gattoufi, S. (2018). Examining the relationships among antecedents of behavioural intentions in adventure sports context. Polish Journal of Sport and Tourism 25(1): 39-47.
Cook, K.S. & Messick, D.M. (1983). Psychological and sociological perspectives on distributive justice: Convergent, divergent and parallel lines. Equity Theory: Psychological and Sociological Perspectives. New York, NY: Praeger Publishers, pp. 1–12.
Klaus, P.G. (1985). Quality phenomenon: The conceptual understanding of quality in face-to-face service encounters. The Service Encounter. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V. & Berry, L. (1985). A conceptual model of service quality and its implications for future research. The Journal of Marketing 49(4): 41-50.
World Trade Organization. (2020). Tourism and travel-related services. Available online at: https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/tourism_e/tourism_e.htm
Zeithaml, V.A. (1988). Consumer perceptions of price, quality and value: A means-end model and synthesis of evidence. Journal of Marketing 52: 2-22.
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Table 1
