Destination Satisfaction and Behavioral Intentions of the Tourists: A Study on Sri Lanka

Abstract

Customer satisfaction is an important concept in tourism marketing and it helps to create, to develop, and to maintain a favorable publicity and goodwill of a tourist destination. Satisfaction is a measure of how products and services supplied by a country/destination meet or surpass the customer expectation. Further, customer satisfaction is considered as a main and important performance indicator of business operations. The main objective of this paper is to identify the tourists’ satisfaction and its effect on their post-purchasing behaviors. The study adopts questionnaire survey by personal interviews with 204 tourists through convenience sampling. Principal component analysis is used for data reduction. Correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis are employed to find the association between dependent and independent variable(s), while ANOVA was used to obtain the research findings. The result of the proposed model confirms that there is a positive correlation and linear relationship between the dependent (behavioral intention of the tourists) and independent variables (factors affecting for tourists satisfaction). The multiple regression analysis results show that the model exists and is named as DESSAT (Destination Satisfaction). The study concluded that the tourists who visited Sri Lanka are satisfied about the observed destination related factors. Further, the tourists are willing to behave positively, i.e. revisit the destination and spread the positive word of mouth publicity. However, the tourists are dissatisfied with several destination related factors of Sri Lanka and recommendations are provided to overcome them.