Quality of Physical Environment and its Effect on Tourists' Satisfaction: A Study on Sri Lanka

Abstract

Sri Lanka is a competitive tourism destination located in South Asian region. It is rich with valuable natural resources all over the island. However, the declining environmental quality adversely affect the tourist satisfaction in Sri Lankan. Therefore, the objective of this study is to assess the quality of the physical environment and its effects on the tourists’ satisfaction. The study was carried out as a questionnaire survey by using 384 international tourists selected through convenience sampling. The descriptive statistics, correlation and regression analyses were utilized to analyze the data. The findings indicate that the poor quality of the physical environment has negatively influenced the tourists' satisfaction and the majority of tourists are dissatisfied with the environmental management of Sri Lanka as a tourist and destination. It is necessary to improve the quality of the physical environment to satisfy the existing tourists then the satisfied tourists will act as evangelists of the Sri Lankan tourism, who spread the positive word of mouth about their positive experiences to others. Therefore, Sri Lanka as a fast growing tourism destination needs taking immediate actions to have a proper garbage management system in order to reduce the visual population of the tourists in order to improve their satisfaction.