Developing Hong Kong tourist satisfaction index using Bayesian structural equation modeling approach

Abstract

Tourist satisfaction has become an increasingly important issue as high tourist satisfaction is likely to contribute to enhanced reputation of tourism product providers and of the whole destination, Assessment on customer satisfaction has received considerable attention. A number of national and industrial customer satisfaction indexes have been developed over the last two decades. Yet the attempt to develop tourist satisfaction index is at its initial stage, Methodologically, there are a number of issues existing in the current studies on satisfaction index. In terms of model estimation and testing, the most widely used maximum likelihood approach relies on the asymptotic assumptions and thus is not robust in the situation of small sample size. Moreover, estimates of another popular method partial least squares are reponed biased. Given the great importance of tourist satisfaction index, and the gaps in the previous research, this study proposes the Hong Kong tourist satisfaction index assessment framework. The proposed tourist satisfaction index assessment framework is a dual-model system. The first model is designed to evaluate tourist satisfaction and its antecedents and consequences at sector level using the Bayesian structural equation modeling approach. The sectoral satisfaction index of each tourism-related sector is first derived. An aggregate service satisfaction index and an overall destination satisfaction index are then calculated based on the second model using the multiple indicators and multiple causes approach. The overall tourist satisfaction is a latent variable with a mixture of formative and reflective indicators The formative indicators for the aggregate service satisfaction are variables of sectoral tourist satisfaction indexes calculated from the sectoral model Through a simulation, this study provides evidence that the proposed Bayesian approach is superior to the conventional partial least squares method in producing more accurate and robust estimates with small samples, A survey involving four tourism-related sectors was conducted in Hong Kong to illustrate the proposed assessment framework. The calculated tourist satisfaction indexes suggest that the aggregate service satisfaction index in Hong Kong is 71.29 out of 100, which is lower than the overall destination satisfaction index (77.35) due to the non-service attributes of the destination which contribute to tourists' experiences in Hong Kong. Among the four studied service sectors, the attractions sector received the highest index score of 76.16, followed by the immigration sector (70.30) and hotels (69.56), The restaurant sector is ranked at the lower end with an index score of 66.93.