THE IMPACTS OF TOUR GUIDES’ SERVABILITY ON FOREIGN TOURIST SATISFACTION: STUDY ON WESTERN PROVINCE, SRI LANKA

Abstract

Tourism is a fast-growing industry in Sri Lanka. In that case stakeholders of the tourism industry act a major role of developing sustainable tourism industry within the island. When considering about the stakeholders of the industry tourist guides take important place. But sometimes when they are operating their performance to achieve their targets while developing the sustainable tourism in sri lanka they have to face many issues. As well as there are many problems in the performances of tourist guides in Sri Lanka. Then collected the data to understand the relationship among tourist guide performance, tourist satisfaction and tourist revisit intention with a survey; questionnaire. Tourist guides performance are described using two major skills called Intrapersonal servability and interpersonal servability with organizational skills. Then questionnaires were given to 150 respondents from tourists who visit Sri Lanka. Finally, three intrapersonal servability skills including appearance, work attitude and communication skill as well as four interpersonal servability and organizational skills including empathy, solving problem skill, organization skill and entertainment introduction skill were identified as the factors that have significant and positive relationship with tourist satisfaction. Furthermore, identified that all above skills besides empathy have significant and positive relationship with tourist revisit intention also.