The international journal of tourism research tập 13, số 05, 2011 09 + 10

Weights of indicators for sustaining rural community tourism developmentDimension B Weight Category C B-C weight Indicators D B-D weight Score Service quality 0.22 Accessibility 0.31 R

This study is to develop indicators that

measure sustainable rural tourism

development within a sustainable

framework It was conducted via a Delphi

technique and the analytical hierarchy

process method After three rounds of

discussions, the panel members reached

consensus on a set of 33 indicators with four

dimensions This set of community-based

rural tourism development indicators can

serve as a starting point for devising a set of

indicators at the local and regional level in

order to be useful rural tourism sector

manager and administrators The selected

indicators are measureable, demand driven

and practical to show the real performance

in rural destination Copyright © 2010 John

Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: sustainable rural tourism; Delphi

technique; analytical hierarchy process

(AHP); indicator

Received 1 February 2010; Revised 22 July 2010; Accepted 26

July 2010

INTRODUCTION

Rural tourism is an economically signifi

-cant sector of the Korean economy and

holds great potential in terms of

sustain-able rural development Sustainsustain-able

develop-ment for community tourism should aim to improve the residents’ quality of life by opti-mizing local economic benefi ts, protecting the natural and built environment and providing a high-quality experience for visitors (Bramwell and Lane, 1993; McIntyre, 1993; Stabler, 1997;

Hall and Lew, 1998; Park et al., 2008; Park and

Yoon, 2009) It should come as no surprise that sustainable community tourism has had limited practical application in the areas of manage-ment, planning and monitoring systems at the local level (Butler, 1999) Berry and Ladkin (1997) have argued that the relatively small size

of most tourist businesses and the dramatic rise

of the sustainability issue have raised serious questions about implementing and monitoring sustainable tourism at local levels

As in many other countries, in Korea, rural tourism is receiving increased recognition as a rural economic development tool The Korean government has launched 1200 community-based rural tourism projects since 2002 The government initiatives have sought to encour-age tourism as an economic substitute for tradi-tional rural economic activities Although rural tourism accommodations have increased dra-matically, government initiatives are not good enough to increase off-farm income for farmers Consequently, Korea has no clearly defi ned national policies and no strategic reports on sustainable development and its implementa-tion Neither a common management frame-work nor indicators exist for systematically tracking and monitoring socio-economic and political changes in communities

According to Weaver and Lawton (1999), indicator studies in tourism are still in their infancy although the World Tourism Organiza-tion (WTO) and other organizations are making sporadic efforts to develop them (Sirakaya

Int J Tourism Res 13, 401–415 (2011)

Published online 7 September 2010 in Wiley Online Library

(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/jtr.804

Developing Sustainable Rural Tourism Evaluation Indicators

Duk-Byeong Park1 and Yoo-Shik Yoon2,*

1 Rural Development Administration, Suwon, Republic of Korea

2 College of Hotel and Tourism, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

*Correspondence to: Prof Yoo-Shik Yoon, College of Hotel

and Tourism, Kyung Hee University, 1 Heogi-dong, Seoul

130-701, Republic of Korea

E-mail: ysyn@khu.ac.kr

et al., 2001; WTO, 2003, 2004) If the infl uence

of tourism on all aspects of community life is

to be effectively tracked, indicators must be

based on policy relevance, analytical

sound-ness and measurability

While the dynamic natures and

unpredict-ability of tourism systems have been observed

and discussed (Butler, 1980, 1999; McKercher,

1999), little research has been conducted in

order to adopt tourism assessment and

man-agement tools that account for uncertainty,

non-linearity and unexpected changes, such as

resilience analysis, adaptive management and

system dynamics modeling (Farrell and

Twining-Ward, 2004, 2005) Generally,

sustain-able community tourism should provide a

long-term economic linkage between

destina-tion communities and industries (Choi and

Sirakaya, 2006) It should also minimize the

negative effects of tourism on the natural

envi-ronment and improve the socio-cultural

well-being of the destination communities

Indicators have been identifi ed as desirable

instruments and/or measuring rods for

assess-ing and monitorassess-ing progress towards

sustain-able development (Tsaur et al., 2006) Butler

(1999) suggests that without measures or

indi-cators for tourism development the use of the

term ‘sustainable’ is meaningless and becomes

hyperbole and advertising jargon Sustainable

tourism indicators (STI) are not only useful in

evaluating the actual impact of sustainable

tourism development policies for measuring

progress; they can also stimulate a learning

process to enhance the overall understanding

of environmental and social problems,

facili-tate community capacity building and help to

identify sustainable development goals and

suitable management strategies (Reed et al.,

1996) The purpose of this study is to develop

indicators for measuring sustainable rural

tourism development (SRTD) within a

sustain-able framework using a Delphi technique and

the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP)

RURAL TOURISM DEVELOPMENT

AND KOREA

Research on rural tourism has been a focus of

tourism research for many years (Suh and

Gartner, 2004), beginning with a focus on the

benefi ts of the industry and evolving through

stages, from ‘advocacy’ (emphasis on economic benefi ts) to ‘cautionary’ (emphasis on environ-mental and socio-cultural impacts) to ‘adap-tancy’ (emphasis on new tourism models), where new models offered ‘more sensitivity to local needs’ (Jafari, 1988; Gartner, 2004, p 153) During this three-decade transition, an empha-sis on the fusion of unspoiled nature and rural life has become increasingly problematic.The defi nition of ‘rural’ (Long, 1998) espoused by Gartner (2004) is ambiguous and includes an emphasis on certain benefi ts to local, small-scale enterprises and ownership

by traditional communities In Korea, it could

be argued that social problems defi ne rural tourism: the rapid depopulation of rural areas, the related disproportionate aging of rural populations and reduced rural labor forces and the governmental emphasis on open-market policies for agriculture These problems have caused a stagnation of rural economies and degradation of the general quality of life.Unlike the USA, where the rural tourism product is tied to a unique resource base or the transformation of gateway communities into attractions (Gartner, 2004), Korea focuses on strategies that offer farmers opportunities for generating and diversifying revenues The catalyst for rural tourism development in Korea since 2000 has been certain demand-based socio-economic developments, includ-ing a higher per capita disposable income, the implementation of a fi ve-day workweek and consequent public investment in rural destina-tion development However, studies on rural tourism have not emerged as rapidly as rural areas have developed; therefore, the specifi c problems and opportunities for rural tourism have not been adequately evaluated Rural tourism remains fi rmly positioned as a tool for promoting the development of economically and socially depressed rural areas

Recent developments in Korea’s rural tourism sector have largely been driven by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (2002, 2008a, 2008b) Since 2002, two kinds of proj-ects — the Rural Traditional Theme Village (RTTV) and the Green Rural Experience Village (GREV) — have focused on rural tourism development, encouraging local or ‘bottom-up’ development and commoditization of local cultural resources Currently, about 1200 rural

communities benefi t from government

devel-opment support under the auspices of the

RTTV and GREV and other programs, up from

27 nominees in 2002 and 137 in 2008 (Ministry

of Agriculture and Forestry, 2008b) In 2009,

the number of accommodation units available

as tourist accommodation, according to the

Rural Development Administration (2009),

was estimated to be about 13 000 rooms in 4400

farm-stay households Rural tourism in South

Korea is still at an introductory stage: most

rural tourists are excursionists with short stays

and a low rate of overnight stays (Park, 2009)

One of the main problems is that the number

of visitors for overnight stays has not increased

much, whereas the number of day visitors has

increased dramatically (see Figure 1)

INDICATORS FOR SUSTAINABLE RURAL

TOURISM DEVELOPMENT

Over the last two decades, the concept of

sustainable tourism development has become

almost universally accepted as a desirable and

politically appropriate approach to tourism

development (Sharpley, 2003) ‘Sustainability’

is a problematic term in tourism research

because it is defi ned in so many different ways

(Euracademy Association, 2005; Gallopin,

2007; Stabler and Goodall 1996), and each defi

-nition has its own economic, ecological or

envi-ronmental contexts In tourism, sustainability

is largely related to the problem of

develop-ment and is often defi ned in terms of the ‘new

tourism’ (Hampton, 2005), which focuses on

homestays, local foods, handicrafts, small

busi-nesses and low-impact transportation (such

as the minibuses and horses that are almost

synonymous with rural tourism) In the big picture, sustainable tourism is concerned with social justice and economic viability as well

as the physical environment (Swarbrooke and Horner, 2004; Mitchell and Hall, 2005) and is simply ‘in a form which can maintain its viability in an area for an indefi nite period

of time’ (Butler 1993, p 13; Butler 1999)

The traditional factors that defi ne able tourism include ‘limits of growth’ in terms

sustain-of resources, activities and community-based notions of sustainability Sustainable tourism focuses on conservation of environmental and cultural resources and emphasizes the partici-pation of local people and the responsibility of visitors (Mvula, 2001; Wood, 2002) In particu-lar, sustainable rural tourism emphasizes com-munity involvement along with conservation (Ashley and Roe, 1998) The conservation of non-renewable resources is also emphasized, along with the need for locally oriented decision-making processes that are transparent and participatory and that work to ensure that tourism development projects remain sustain-able after exterior funding is exhausted (WTO,

2004; Shunnaq et al., 2008) New

development-oriented approaches focus on optimization and the development of new life-cycle models (Lim and Cooper, 2009)

In conjunction with developing notions of sustainability and its importance in tourism is

a growing number of approaches in the use of indicators for monitoring the progress towards sustainability in tourism development Numer-ous perspectives on sustainable develop-ment in the contexts of agriculture, forestry, community development and tourism have generated their own sets of indicators (Allin

Figure 1 Annual number of visitors for day visit and overnight stay

et al., 2001; Miller, 2001; Ceron and Dubois,

2003; WTO, 2003, 2004; Miller and

Twining-Ward, 2005; Choi and Sirakaya, 2006; Hyde et

al., 2007) that differ in terms of their domains

and the implications of sustainable

deve-lopment Sustainable tourism development

involves conceptual and practical diffi culties

(Tao and Wall, 2009) that have infl uenced the

often poorly selected range of sustainability

indicators (Meadows, 1998), and this in turn has

led to serious misinterpretation of assessment

results Some of the ‘good indicators’ generally

used in tourism research include resonance

to target audience, robustness, credibility,

sensitivity, availability of data, regularity,

cost-effectiveness and the lack of ambiguity and

comparability (Moldan et al., 1997; Allin et al.,

2001; Ceron and Dubois, 2003) In reality,

though, it is diffi cult to fi nd sustainability

indi-cators for the assessment of tourism

destina-tions that actually meet these ideal characteristics

(Hughes, 2002; Schianetz and Kavanagh, 2008)

According to Hunter and Sur (2007), a better

approach to the development of rural tourism

sustainability indicators employs increasingly

popular multi-method or mixed-method

approaches in which any combination of

quan-titative and qualitative methods lend deeper

insight into the research problem In this paper,

such an approach is taken, mixing expert-led

(top-down) and local stakeholder (bottom-up)

approaches (Bell and Morse, 2001) The

top-down approach uses explicitly quantitative

indicators and acknowledges the complexity

of social and ecological perspectives, whereas

the bottom-up approach employs a qualitative

approach and works to enhance the ongoing

collective learning process in the community

or tourism destination by defi ning

sustainabil-ity goals and priorities within the local context

This approach, however, might not necessarily

cover all important aspects of, or criterion for,

sustainability

METHODS

Using the Delphi method and the analytical

hierarchy process

The research described in this paper employs

a multi-method approach that includes the

Delphi method and the AHP The Delphi method, a bottom-up, qualitative approach, is used to gather and categorize stakeholders’ attitudes and stated values concerning rural tourism and its effects The AHP, a quantitative approach, is used to evaluate top-down or expert-led perspectives on rural tourism sustainability

The Delphi method has been in use over the last thirty years as a method that systemati-cally combines ‘expert knowledge and opinion

to arrive at an informed group consensus on a complex problem’ (Donohoe and Needham,

2009, p 416) The method is structured to be a refl exive alternative to focus group interviews and other similar approaches (Needham and

de Loe, 1990) The AHP (Saaty, 1980) has also been used for at least thirty years in multi-ple-criteria decision-making and is a common application for performance evaluation (Hsieh

et al., 2008) AHP is popular in tourism

plan-ning and tourism destination choice (Chen,

2006; Hsu et al., 2009) It facilitates an approach

to understanding decision factors and their relative weight or importance and is useful when used to evaluate expert decision-makers’ expressed preferences or opinions

This study used an integrated Delphi-AHP method to identify important factors and their qualitative and quantitative bearing on indica-tors for evaluating sustainable rural commu-nity tourism development in Korea The Delphi method has been used to survey major factors, and the AHP has been utilized to defi ne their signifi cance The Delphi-AHP is applicable to

a wide range of complex, multi-criteria sions that require judgments about qualitative characteristics from a group of panels

deci-The evaluation procedure of this study sists of several steps, as shown in Figure 2 First, we collected a series of indicators of SRTD from the literature related to rural tourism contexts, including sustainable rural tourism indicators in Austria, France and Germany Second, the Delphi technique was used to refi ne and identify the fi nal indicators for SRTD evaluation according to the charac-teristics of our study case Third, the AHP was applied to calculate the weight of each crite-rion after the evaluation criteria hierarchy was constructed The evaluation of the SRTD is a

con-complex and comprehensive problem

There-fore, the solution requires the most inclusive

and fl exible method Since the AHP is designed

to systematize complicated problems, is easy

to implement, and integrates the opinion of

multiple experts and stakeholders, it was

selected to compute the weights for this study

In the main, the AHP weighting was

deter-mined by the decision-makers, who conduct

pairwise comparisons in order to reveal the

relative importance of the criteria

Data collection and analysis

In this study, the Delphi technique was used in

the development of objective indicators for

sus-tainable rural development, a method

per-ceived as a useful starting point for predicting

future events based on group consensus

(Twining-Ward and Butler, 2002) A similar

approach was used to develop the WTO

core indicators of sustainable development

(Manning, 1999) In the Delphi technique,

expert stakeholders’ opinions are recruited and

compared (Miller and Twining-Ward, 2005)

The panel members who participated in this

study were selected in three ways First, 12

sustainable tourism experts recommended the

potential panelists, and another list of potential

panelists was drawn from an initial list of 25

authors who had published at least one

peer-reviewed paper on sustainable tourism

devel-opment in journals in Korea, such as the Journal

of Tourism Sciences, Journal of Culture and Tourism

Research and Journal of Tourism and Leisure

Research Six practical experts involved in

tourism development projects sponsored by

the Korea Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry

(employed variously in central and local government organizations or in local or rural communities as ‘leaders’) were recruited and interviewed for driving measurable indication

at the rural community level An additional six panelists were selected from the 168 members

of the Korean Rural Tourism Association

(Journal of Rural Tourism).

The study also employed a snowball pling using fi ve nationally recognized tourism scholars identifi ed by the Delphi board This snowball sampling approach is a form of purposive sampling (Noth, 1990) in which a structured sample of respondents who are the-oretically relevant to the research problem (in this case, rural tourism sustainability) are needed (Brown, 1980) These scholars were asked to provide the names of potential Delphi panel members The list was then cross checked for duplication of names Fifty-four potential panel members were identifi ed and 34 panel members agreed to participate in Delphi (response rate 79.5%) were chosen for the fi rst round of study Consecutive second and third rounds included only original Delphi panel members who agreed to continue sharing their expertise on developing later versions of the rural STI set The number of panel members participating in the second is 34 (response rate 85.7%) and third rounds is 30 (response rate 100.0%)

sam-The research instrument used in this study was developed with an informed theoretical outlook coupled with the opinions and com-ments offered by the Delphi board It con-sisted of questions divided into three sections focusing on three topics: defi nitions, princi-ples and potential indicators The panel

Collect the SRTD Indicators from Literature

Review

Three Times Delphi Technique (Qualitative) Refine and Identify Indicators for the SRTD

Evaluations

One Times AHP (Quantitative) Calculate the Weights of the SRTD Indicators

Figure 2 Procedure of the sustainable rural tourism development indications

members were asked to form their own defi

ni-tions and to identify the necessary principles

of sustainable tourism Then, based on their

individual defi nitions, panel members were

asked to create a list of STI useful in

monitor-ing the progress or problem areas in four key

dimensions of rural tourism: service quality,

facilities, management systems and outcome

Eleven sub-dimensions (categories) were

developed These dimensions and the number

of indicators for each dimension are listed in

Table 1 The results of the fi rst round were

categorized and synthesized for use in the

second and third rounds

The questionnaire was distributed to the

second round of Delphi panel members, and

there was a response rate of 85.7%

Respon-dents rated their opinion of the statements

included in the four key dimensions and 11

sub-dimensions developed in round 1 using a

5-point Likert scale In round 3, a Delphi panel

of the remaining respondents completed a

questionnaire that was developed to reduce

potential biases produced by panel member

groupthink Respondents evaluated

sustain-ability indicators in terms of ‘soundness’ (either

‘sound’ or ‘not sound’) Respondents received

additional feedback information regarding

sta-tistical mean scores and standard deviation for

each of the indicators developed for

reconsid-eration after completion of the round 3 survey

Following Uysal and Crompton (1985), the

comments that were made by respondents

were grouped, and where appropriate, turned into questions to establish the depth and strength of opinion relating to that particular issue Respondents were also asked to describe how indicators would be operationalized in practice in the rural tourism context

Findings derived from the Delphi study in the form of dimensions and corresponding indicators were further analyzed using the AHP Index weight values were determined using a systematic and hierarchical combina-tion of qualitative and quantitative analyses.Equations used in the determination of index

weight values (Lifang et al., 2008) helped

deter-mine a ‘total-aim’ evaluation model in which

an expert panel scores the relative importance

of the Delphi study are shown in Table 2, along with their mean scores, standard deviation, measurability and soundness Each itemized indicator in each dimension has been rated by panel members from strongly agree (5) to strongly disagree (1)

After three rounds, the indicators panel members had provided were classifi ed into

Table 1 Number of indicators developed from the Delphi study

Note: Response rate — round 1: 79.5%; round 2: 85.7%; round 3: 100.0%.

Table 2 Indicators for evaluating sustainable rural community tourism

Service

quality

Equip a directional sign to the village within 5 km

Ratio of rooms with fl ush toilet 4.43 0.94 0.94

Subsidiary facilities

Meeting room with about 20 people capacities

Parking lots that hold over 20 cars 4.14 0.77 0.86Environment Refuse disposal system in their community 3.86 1.23 0.76Management

system

Community planning

Long-term community plan for latest three years

Number of expert consultation for developing tourism

Collaborated community business

Minutes and account book for community council meetings

Tourism business Ratio of householder participating in

community tourism business

Full time worker to managing their tourism business

Income and total sales

Increasing rate of a number of visitors 4.36 0.63 0.95

Number of one company one village linkage

four dimensions: service quality, facilities,

management system and outcome Three

rounds of the survey yielded the six indicators

for the service quality dimension The panel

members heavily favored the ‘accessibility’

and ‘convenience’ sub-dimensions These

include ‘reservation system on home page’ and

‘equip a directional sign to the village within

fi ve km’ as well as ‘number of people who took

lectures on rural tourism’ Panel members

reached agreement on six facilities criteria,

subdivided into three categories:

accommoda-tions, subsidiary facilities and environment

Some of the top indicators were ‘ratio of rooms

with fl ush toilet’, ‘ratio rooms with shower

bath’ and ‘parking lots that hold over 20 cars’

The ‘management system’ dimension has

four categories and produced 15 indicators

The ‘community planning’ category had three

indicators, including ‘long-term community

plan for last three years’ and ‘fund-raising in

their community.’ And the ‘community

man-agement’ category included four indicators:

‘minutes and account book for community

council meetings’, ‘propaganda within last

three years’, ‘organizing and participating in

local tourism development council’, and

‘enact-ing community agreements’

AHP results

As for the comprehensive principles of tourism

development in the rural communities in

Korea, we should consider as fully as possible

the infl uencing factors, making the system

refl ect the true situation

Based on AHP, we divided the evaluation system into four levels The fi rst level is the target layer (i.e the sustainability and measur-ability of tourism development goals) The second level is the guideline, including four major dimensions: service quality importance, facility importance, management system importance and outcome importance The third level is the sub-dimension (category) that includes 11 specifi c targets: accessibility, convenience, accommodations, subsidiary facilities, environment, community planning, collaborated community business, community management, tourism business, satisfaction, income and total sales The fourth level com-prises the 33 indicators The unifi ed classifi ca-tion of ingredients creates a relative hierarchy and sets the stage for establishing a model tree

of total-aim evaluation

Service quality importance (B1)

The specifi c meanings of evaluation indicators and standards are as follows Accessibility is divided into ‘reservation system on homep-age’, ‘fi t tourist guide book and map’, and

‘equip a directional sign to the village within

fi ve km’ Convenience is divided into ‘ratio of householders who have checklists for bedding’,

‘using credit card for paying a fee’, and ‘number

of people who took lectures on rural tourism’

dimension consists of three sub-dimensions:

accommodations, subsidiary facilities and

environment Accommodation is divided into

‘ratio of rooms isolated from host family

house’, ‘ratio of rooms with fl ush toilet’, and

‘ratio rooms with shower bath’ Subsidiary

facilities mean ‘meeting room with about a 20

person capacity’ and ‘parking lots that hold

over 20 cars’ Environment means ‘refuse

dis-posal system in their community’

Community management importance (B3)

The specifi c meanings and standards for the

indicators are as follows The management

system dimension consists of four

sub-dimen-sions: community planning, collaborated

com-munity business, comcom-munity management

and tourism business Community planning

can be divided into ‘long-term community

plan for last three years’, ‘fund-raising in their

community’ and ‘amount of expert

consulta-tion for developing tourism’ Collaborated

community business holds four criteria:

‘com-munity festival’, ‘ratio of householders with

tourism management diary’, ‘value-added

processing businesses in their community’ and

‘Internet sales for their own products in their

community.’ Community management can be

divided into ‘minutes and account book for

community council meetings’, ‘propaganda

within last three years’, ‘organizing and

par-ticipating in local tourism development

council’ and ‘enacting community agreements.’

Tourism business comprises four criteria: ‘ratio

of householders participating in community

tourism business’, ‘full-time worker to manage

their tourism business’, ‘insurance for visitors’

and ‘constructing customer database’

Outcome importance (B4)

The specifi c meanings and standards for the

indicators are as follows The outcome

dimen-sion consists of two dimendimen-sions: income and

total sales Satisfaction means ‘residents’

satis-faction’ and ‘visitors’ satissatis-faction’ Income and

total sales are divided into ‘increasing rate of a

number of visitors’, ‘increasing rate of direct

sales’, ‘number of one company one village

linkage’ and ‘ratio of equity capital per

‘reservation system on Internet homepage,’

‘number of people who took lectures on rural tourism’, and ‘residents’ satisfaction’ are higher, which should be given attention during the tourism development of the rural commu-nity in Korea There are three indices whose weight values are less than 0.20, including

‘insurance for visitors’, ‘number of one company one village linkage’, (linkage program that one company support for one rural village

to visit them and buy agricultural products) and ‘ratio of equity capital per government assistance’ These indicators will be scored from 2 to 6 and used to calculate a fi nal score

on an indicator Based on the above points, this paper attempts to use subjective measures to directly investigate residents and stakeholders’ perceptions in the Delphi panel and to add ‘residents’ satisfaction’ to the indi-cators, thus forming the basis for evaluating sustainable rural community tourism develop-ment (Table 3)

view-CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONSIndicators are to serve as a guideline for future tourism development at all levels of planning

In addition, they are to be tailored in such a way that they clearly refl ect the situation of tourism with respect to sustainability while

Table 3 Weights of indicators for sustaining rural community tourism development

Dimension

(B) Weight Category (C)

B-C weight Indicators (D)

B-D weight Score Service

quality

0.22 Accessibility 0.31 Reservation system on Internet homepage 0.35 5

Fit tourist guide book and map 0.21 3 Equip a directional sign to the village

within fi ve km

0.22 3 Convenience 0.50 Ratio of householders who has checklists

for bedding

0.28 4 Using credit card for paying a fee 0.26 4 Number of people who took lectures on

facilities

0.16 Meeting room with about 20 people

capacities

0.19 3 Parking lots over 20 cars 0.21 3 Environment 0.35 Refuse disposal system in their community 0.20 3 Management

developing tourism

0.18 3 Collaborated

community business

0.20 Community festival 0.22 3 Ratio of householder with tourism

management diary

0.18 3 Value-added processing businesses in their

community

0.21 3 Internet sales for their own products in

their community

0.19 3 Community

management

0.25 Minutes and account book for community

council meetings

0.18 3 Propaganda within latest three years 0.21 3 Organizing and participating in local

tourism development council

0.22 3 Enacting an community agreements 0.24 3 Tourism

business

0.23 Ratio of householder participating in

community tourism business

0.23 3 Full time worker to managing their

tourism business

0.22 3 Insurance for visitors 0.16 2 Constructing customer database 0.22 3 Outcome 0.19 Satisfaction 0.66 Residents’ satisfaction 0.34 5

Visitors’ satisfaction 0.42 6 Income and

total sales (C42)

0.22 Increasing rate of a number of visitors 0.25 3 Increasing rate of direct sales 0.24 3 Number of one company one village

linkage

0.16 2 Ratio of equity capital per government

assistance

0.16 2

Note: General ranking C R <0.1, consistency test satisfi ed The lowest score is 2, the highest score is 6 and so the sum of total score is 100.

assisting regional and local stakeholders with

tourism planning It is likely that the use of

SRTD indicators that are wholly derived from

a local and practical perspective through local

processes of participation will underestimate

tourist activity’s impact as a user of rural

resources at the global scale Rural tourists

attract lots of outdoor activities which are

hiking, horse riding, cycling, cow riding,

fi shing and sporting, etc Furthermore,

different sets of locally derived and

contextual-ized indicators make it less easy to compare

different areas of products in terms of

sustainability

The purpose of this study is to develop

indi-cators to measure SRTD within a sustainable

framework In order to achieve the objective of

the study, a Delphi technique and AHP were

employed A panel of 30 academic researchers

and fi eld workers in tourism provided input

into the development of the indicators After

three rounds of discussions and one AHP

questionnaire, the panel members reached

consensus on the following set of 33 indicators

from the following four dimensions which are

service quality (5 indicators), facilities (5

indi-cators), management system (15 indicators)

and outcome (6 indicators) This set of

commu-nity-based rural tourism development

indica-tors can serve as a starting point for devising

a set of indicators at the local and regional

levels

The evaluation of the suitableness of tourism

for sustainable rural community tourism

development involves multi-purpose decision

theory, which is a guide to the evaluation

among many indicators and many candidates

We made a weighting set through AHP to

avoid the shortcomings in the ordinary

weight-ing process, to perform the tourism evaluation

with a maturely developed method and to

effectively solve the multi-indicator evaluation

problems that involve fuzziness and

variabil-ity of scaling Our calculating method is a

simple, quantitative and feasible one with

general signifi cance for non-structuralized

projects in the development of rural

commu-nity tourism

In the established evaluation system, weight

values of eight indexes are higher than 0.25,

among which the weight of visitors’

satisfac-tion and the number of people taking service

education are the highest, and the weight of residents’ satisfaction, reservation on Internet homepage, quality control cards, linen cards, and number of visitors was also higher Weight values of three indexes are lower than 0.02, including linking one company and one village, equity capital rate and insurance for their business

The development of indicators for ing sustainability in tourism destination needs

monitor-to be based on comprehensive approaches that recognize interrelations between top-down and bottom-up thinking due to the complex and dynamic nature of tourism development Also, sustainability indicators need to allow for adaptive learning processes within the local community or tourism destinations Most

of the indicators in the previous studies (Choi and Sirakaya, 2006; Tsaur and Wang, 2007; Logar, 2010; Sala, 2010) were classifi ed by eco-nomic, social and environmental aspects After three rounds of discussions and an AHP ques-tionnaire, the panel members reached a con-sensus on a set of 33 indicators with four different aspects: service quality, facilities, management system and outcome These aspects differ from general dimensions in previous studies — such as the economic, the social, the ecological and the technologi-cal — because these indicators must be based

on more practical policy relevance and surability rather than theoretical approaches Additionally, the number of indicators is small

mea-in comparison with previous studies Arrivmea-ing

at the least number of necessary indicators is important in allowing policy makers to effec-tively evaluate and monitor about 1200 nation-wide community-based tourism projects in Korea

If these indicators were rearranged ing to traditional dimensions such as the eco-nomic, the social and the environmental, previous studies might account for them The economic indicators are most important for the initial stage of a community-based tourism development project in Korea These are the 12 indicators in the management system and outcome dimensions, including the ‘collabo-rated community business’, ‘tourism business’ and ‘income’ categories The second priority is the technical dimension It covers nine indica-tors, including ‘accessibility’, ‘convenience’

accord-and ‘community management’ category The

third priority has tourism environmental

dimension The dimension has six indicators

including ‘environment’, ‘accommodation’

and ‘subsidiary facilities’ The fi nal priority

has fi ve indicators within the social dimension,

including portions of the ‘community

manage-ment’ and ‘satisfaction’ categories The social

dimension is smaller in this study than in some

others This does not mean that the social

dimension is generally not important in Korea

Rather, in the Korean rural tourism context, it

is hard not only to consider social dimension

as a policy priority for policy makers, but also

to measure social dimension effectively for

1200 nationwide community-based tourism

projects

The emphasis on economic factors for

sus-tainability is derived from Korean rural tourism

situations The Government Program on Rural

Tourism Development has developed

approxi-mately a total of 1200 villages since its launched

in 2002 In 2009, the number of accommodation

units available as tourist accommodation,

according to the Rural Development

Adminis-tration (2009), was estimated to be about 12 000

rooms in 4400 farm-stay households Average

number of farm-stay household per tourism

village is 3.66 and the average number of room

per village is 2.78 Even if the number of

tourism accommodations dramatically

increases during nine years, the Korean rural

tourism business is still at an introductory

stage Household annual earnings are less than

US$2000 in 80% of farm-stay households (Rural

Development Administration, 2009) The

rela-tively small size of most tourist businesses and

the dramatic rise of sustainability issues in

Korea have raised serious questions about

implementing and monitoring sustainable

tourism at local levels because sustainable

rural tourism has had limited practical

applica-tions in the areas of management, planning

and monitoring systems at the local and

com-munity level

According to the results of the AHP, the

infl uence of sustainable rural community

tourism development was most signifi cant for

the convenience and satisfaction for the

visi-tors and residents Also, experts in the Delphi

method were most concerned about visitors’

satisfaction, residents’ satisfaction, the

reserva-tion system on websites, the increasing rate of direct sales and the ratio of rooms with a fl ush toilet This implied that satisfaction, business income, accessibility and accommodations are the most important factors in ensuring the sus-tainability of tourism development

In order to develop sustainable rural tourism

by means of the SRTD indicator, tourism ning is a necessary condition for achieving the goals of the SRTD Residents are willing to par-ticipate in the decision-making process for the current and future development of their com-munity Accordingly, communities can aid in proper planning by ensuring that all partici-pants in the process are well informed about pertinent issues Involving residents is crucial because they are a major stakeholder group

plan-in a rural tourism destplan-ination Educatplan-ing stakeholder groups should be a top priority because one of the major failures in imple-menting indicators at the local level has been

a lack of awareness and participation among stakeholders

Although more people in Korea are ning to pay attention to rural tourism develop-ment, the corresponding systems and support measures are still immature Many destina-tions suffer from the phenomenon of honoring the name of rural tourism destinations on the surface but providing a low level of facilities, and in reality, degrading the environment From a practical viewpoint, service quality, facility, village management and tourism out-comes are all urgent problems that need to be addressed These indicators could help the administration to regularly monitor the inter-action among stakeholders and avoid poor decisions that may disrupt administrators’ relationships with these stakeholders

begin-With respect to rural tourism development policy, a well-designed plan for tourism devel-opment in Korea is lacking First, the various levels of government have to play a critical role through their institutional leadership to guar-antee stakeholders’ participation for the SRTD The governments’ role is also essential in the establishment of regulatory and policy frame-works, ensuring the enforcement and applica-tion of appropriate economic instruments, which include the removal of environmentally perverse subsidies and monitoring of environ-mental quality

Tourism authorities should advocate for

regulations that are related to ecological

opera-tions In the initial stage of rural tourism

devel-opment, it is important to maintain economic

viability as a factor of sustainability As such,

government authorities can guide the tourism

business towards sustainable development,

especially to establish vacation programs for

rural tourists Governments should solicit their

residents’ participation both directly and

through representative boards because

sus-tainable rural tourism development should be

planned and managed by community

stake-holders that can infl uence decision-making

and guarantee to all stakeholders a fair

distri-bution of benefi ts

Finally, the study has some limitations First,

the indicators developed do not include some

indicators of social cohesion such as ‘sense of

community’ and ‘community attachment.’

Furthermore, social cohesion indicators can be

adapted from social indicators Although the

indicators do not include vegetation cover,

bio-diversity or quantity of species, the results of

this study emphasized high weighting for

cus-tomer and visitors’ satisfaction and

environ-mental awareness in keeping with previous

studies (Miller, 2001; Tsaur and Wang, 2007;

Sala, 2010) Second, it has also been shown that

economic and technical aspects in this study

are valued highly and are consistent with some

studies that have emphasized economic

out-comes and technical feasibility for

sustainabil-ity (Choi and Sirakaya, 2006; Logar, 2010) In

the practical point of view for specifi c country

rural tourism context it is understood that

community-based rural tourism development

projects (including some government

initia-tives in Korea) have sought to encourage

tourism as an economic substitute for

tradi-tional rural economic activities Lastly, the

fi ndings here do not take into account a

previ-ous study (Tao and Wall, 2009) that argues that

individuals sustain themselves through

mul-tiple activities rather than discrete jobs and

that rural tourism complements rather than

displaces existing activities The previous

study was overlooked because the indications

in this study are perceived not at the

in-dividual level but at the community level to

evaluate and monitor community-based rural

tourism projects

Sustainable tourism is concerned with social justice and economic viability as well s the physical environment and is also about the future A review of the literature shows that only a few sustainable indicators for sustain-able tourism development were tested in a des-tination setting In order to build the effi ciency and effectiveness of indicators that monitor the impact of tourism not only on natural and cul-tural resources and host communities but also economic viability and social justice, these indicators should be tested in a real rural com-munity setting Future studies may need to consider and produce more valuable results related to sustainable rural tourism develop-ment and its indicators

Inter-(ed.) Continuum: London; 163–174

Ap J, Crompton JL 1998 Developing and testing a

tourism impact scale Journal of Travel Research

Bell S, Morse S 2001 Breaking through the glass ceiling: who really cares about sustainability indi-

cators? Local Environment 6(3): 291–309.

Berry S, Ladkin A 1997 Sustainable tourism: a

regional perspective Tourism Management 18(7):

433–440

Bramwell B, Lane B 1993 Sustainable tourism: an

evolving global approach Journal of Sustainable

Tourism 1(1): 1–5.

Brown SR 1980 Political Subjectivity: Applications of

Q Methodology in Political Science Yale University

Press: London

Butler RW 1980 The concept of a tourist area cycle

of evolution: implications for management and

resources Canadian Geographer 24(1): 5–12.

Butler RW 1993 Tourism — an evolutionary

per-spective In Tourism and Sustainable Development: Monitoring, Planning, Managing, Nelson JG, Butler

RW, Wall G (eds) University of Waterloo ment of Geography Publication 37): Waterloo, Ontario; 27–44

(Depart-Butler RW 1999 Sustainable tourism: a state-of

the-art review Tourism Geographies 1(1): 7–25.

Ceron J, Dubois G 2003 Tourism and sustainable

development indicators: the gap between

theo-retical demands and practical achievements

Current Issues in Tourism 6(1): 54–75.

Chen CF 2006 Applying the analytical hierarchy

process approach to convention site selection

Journal of Tourism Research 45: 167–174.

Choi HC, Sirakaya E 2006 Sustainability indicators

for managing community tourism Tourism

Management 27: 1274–1289.

Donohoe HM, Needham RD 2009 Moving best

practice forward: Delphi characteristics,

advan-tages, potential problems, and solutions

Interna-tional Journal of Tourism Research 11: 415–437.

Euracademy Association 2005 Thematic Guide Four:

Social Capital and Sustainable Rural Development

Euracademy Thematic Guide Series Euracademy

Association: Iimajoki, Finland

Farrell B,Twining-Ward L 2004 Reconceptualising

Tourism Annals of Tourism Research 31(2):

274–295

Farrell B,Twining-Ward L 2005 Seven Steps

towards Sustainability: Tourism in the Context

of New Knowledge Journal of Sustainable

Tourism 13(2): 109–122.

Gartner WC 2004 Rural tourism development in

the USA International Journal of Tourism Research

6: 151–164

Gallopin GC 1997 Indicators and their use:

information for decision-making In Sustainability

Indicators: A Report on the Project on Indicators

of Sustainable Development: Scope 58, Moldan B,

Billharz S, Matravers R (eds) Wiley: New York;

13–27

Hall CM, Lew AA 1998 The geography of

sustain-able tourism development: introduction In

Sus-tainable Tourism: Geographical Perspectives, Hall

CM, Lew AA (eds) Addison Wesley Longman

Ltd.: New York; 1–24

Hampton MP 2005 Heritage, local communities

and economic development Annals of Tourism

Research 32: 735–759.

Hsieh LF, Lin LH, Lin YY 2008 A service quality

measurement architecture for hot spring hotels in

Taiwan Tourism Management 29: 429–438.

Hsu TK, Tsai YF, Wu HH 2009 The preference

analysis for tourist choice of destination:

a case study of Taiwan Tourism Management 30:

288–297

Hughes G 2002 Environmental indicators Annals

of Tourism Research 29(2): 457–477.

Hunter WC, Suh YK 2007 Multimethod research

on destination image perception: Jeju standing

stones Tourism Management 28(1): 130–139.

Hyde R, Moore R, Kavanagh L, Schianetz K, Prasad

D, Blair J, Watt M, Bayada B, Hair A 2007

Planning and Design Standard for Improving Sustainability of Neighborhoods and Precincts

CRC for Sustainable Tourism: Gold Coast, Australia

Jafari J 1988 Retrospective and prospective views on tourism as a fi eld of study Paper presented at the

1988 Meeting of the Academy of Leisure Sciences, Indianapolis, Indiana

Lifang Q, Yichuan Z, Lei F 2008 A model of ability evaluation of tourism development for the suburban mining wasteland and its empirical

suit-research Ecological Economy 4: 338–345.

Lim CC, Cooper C 2009 Beyond sustainability:

optimizing island tourism development

Interna-tional Journal of Tourism Research 11: 89–103.

Logar I 2010 Sustainable tourism management in Crikvenica, Croatia: an assessment of policy

instruments Tourism Management 31(1): 125–135.

Long P 1998 Rural Tourism Foundation Information Piece University of Colorado: Boulder, CO.

Manning T 1999 Indicators of Tourism

Sustainabil-ity Tourism Management 20(1): 179-181.

McIntyre G 1993 Sustainable Tourism Development: Guide for Local Planners World Tourism Organiza-

tion: Madrid, Spain

McKercher B 1999 A Chaos Approach to Tourism

Tourism Management 20(4): 425–434.

Meadows D 1998 Indicators and Information Systems for Sustainable Development A Report to the Balaton Group The Sustainability Institute: Hartland Four

of Developing and Using Indicators CABI

Publishing: Wallingford, UK

Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) 2002

Agricultural and Rural Policy Technical Report

MAF: Gwachen, South Korea

Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) 2008a

Directions for Agricultural and Rural Policy

Techni-cal Report MAF: Gwachen, South Korea

Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) 2008b

Situations of the Rural Integrated Development Projects Technical Report MAF: Gwachen, South

Korea

Mitchell M, Hall D 2005 Rural tourism as

sustain-able business: key themes and issues In Rural Tourism and Sustainable Business, Hall D,

Kirkpatrick I, Mitchell M (eds) Channel View Publications: Tonawanda, NY; 3–16

Moldan B, Billharz S, Matravers R (eds) 1997

Sustainability Indicators: A Report on the Project

on Indicators of Sustainable Development Wiley:

New York

Mvula CD 2001 Fair trade in tourism to protected

areas — a micro case study of wildlife tourism to

South Luangwa National Park, Zambia

Interna-tional Journal of Tourism Research 3: 393–405.

Needham RD, de Loe R 1990 The policy Delphi:

purpose, structure, and application The Canadian

Geographer 34(2): 133–142.

Noth W 1990 Handbook of Semiotics Indiana

Uni-versity Press: Indianapolis, IN

Park D, Yoon Y 2009 Segmentation by motivation

in rural tourism: a Korean case study Tourism

Management 30: 99–108.

Park D, Yoon Y, Lee M 2008 Rural community

development and policy challenges in South

Korea Journal of the Economic Geographical Society

of Korea 11(4): 600–617.

Reed MS, Fraser EDG, Dougill AJ 2006 An

adaptive learning process for developing and

applying sustainability indicators with local

communities Ecological Economics 59: 406–418.

Rural Development Administration 2009 Report on

Annual Research in 2009 Rural Development

Administration: Suwon, Republic of Korea

Saaty TL 1980 The Analytic Hierarchy Process —

Planning, Priority Setting, Resource Allocation

McGraw-Hill: New York

Sala VCS 2010 Sustainable performance index for

tourism policy development Tourism

Manage-ment 31(6): 871–880.

Schianetz K, Kavanagh L 2008 Sustainability

indi-cators for tourism destinations: a complex

adap-tive systems approach using systemic indicator

systems Journal of Sustainable Tourism 16(6):

601–628

Sharpley R 2003 Rural Tourism and

Sustain-ablility — a Critique In New Directions in Rural

Tourism, Hall D, Roberts L, Mitchell M (eds.)

Ashgate Publishing Limited, Aldershot; 38–53

Shunnaq M, Schwab, WA, Reid MF 2008

Commu-nity development using a sustainable tourism

strategy: a case study of the Jordan River Valley

touristway International Journal of Tourism Research

10: 1–14

Sirakaya E, Jamal T, Choi HS 2001 Developing

tourism indicators for destination sustainability

In The Encyclopedia of Ecotourism, Weaver DB (ed.)

CAB International: New York; 411–432

Stabler MJ (ed.) 1997 Tourism and Sustainability: Principles to Practice Cab International: New

Korea Journal of Travel Research 43(1): 39–45.

Swarbrooke J, Horner S 2004 Consumer Behavior in Tourism Butterworth-Heinemann: Burlington,

MA

Tao TCH, Wall G 2009 Tourism as a sustainable

livelihood strategy Tourism Management 30: 90–98.

Tsaur S-H, Lin, Y-C, Lin J-H 2006 Evaluating ecotourism sustainability from the intergrated perspective of resource, community and tourism

Tourism Management 27: 640–653.

Tsaur S, Wang C 2007 The evaluation of able tourism development by analytic hierarchy process and fuzzy set theory: an empirical study

sustain-on the Green Island in Taiwan Asia Pacifi c Journal

of Tourism Research 12(3): 127–145.

Twining-Ward L, Butler R 2002 Implementing STD

on a small island: development and use of sustainable tourism development indicators in

Samoa Journal of Sustainable Tourism 10(5):

363–387

Uysal M, Crompton JL 1985 An overview of approaches used to forecast to tourism demand

Journal of Travel Research 23(4): 7–15.

Weaver DB, Lawton L 1999 Sustainable Tourism: A Critical Analysis CRC for sustainable tourism

research report series, Research Report 1 CRC Sustainable Tourism, Gold Coast, Australia

Wood ME 2002 Ecotourism: Principles, Practices and Policies for Sustainability United Nations Environ-

ment Programme (UNEP): Paris, France

WTO (The World Tourism Organization) 2003 cators for the Sustainable Management of Tourism Report of the International Working Group on Indica- tors of Sustainable Tourism to the Environment Committee World Tourism Organization: Madrid,

Indi-Spain

WTO (The World Tourism Organization) 2004

Indicators of Sustainable Development for Tourism Destinations: A Guidebook WTO: Madrid.

This study assesses tourist satisfaction and

its links with service quality using a

hierarchical model that combines four

primary determinants and eight

corresponding sub-dimensions A sample of

616 tourists departing from Kinmen Airport

was surveyed with a structured

questionnaire after they had just visited

Kinmen National Park A series of analyses

was performed to explore tourist satisfaction

with the four main service quality attributes

as well as their willingness of repeat visits

and recommendation As a result, it was

consistently found that service quality has

positive signifi cant relationship with tourist

satisfaction It is thus suggested that

national park managers have to satisfy

tourists with a high level of service quality,

based on the concept that service quality

may have a signifi cant infl uence on

long-term behavioural intentions through high

levels of customer satisfaction Copyright ©

2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Received 30 March 2010; Revised 17 June 2010; Accepted 31

August 2010

Keywords: behavioural intentions; service quality; tourist satisfaction; customer loyalty; Kinmen National Park

INTRODUCTION

National parks, by their very nature, are

important places for the protection

of ecological systems and natural resources as well as for the provision of recre-ational and tourism opportunities for the public

(Ma et al., 2009) Furthermore, national parks

are considered to be repositories of outstanding natural scenery, as well as cultural and/or his-toric resources Both are popular and signifi cant

as sites of tourism development (Zhong et al.,

2008) From a Western perspective, the tives of a national park revolve around a tension between two values — preservation and recre-ation — and thus this tension must be resolved

objec-in ways pertobjec-inent to each case as determobjec-ined by not only the nature of the park but also the political, economic and legal frameworks within which they operate (Barros, 2005) This notion implies the role that economic develop-ment plays in the national parks As noted by

Ryan et al (2008), national parks serve as

impor-tant nodes of economic growth In this sense, external and internal forces that shaped tourism development in the national parks must

be studied in order to retain the ness and sustainability of the national parks

competitive-It is argued that one of the fundamental

Int J Tourism Res 13, 416–432 (2011)

Published online 14 October 2010 in Wiley Online Library

(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/jtr.810

Tourist Behavioural Intentions in

Relation to Service Quality and

Customer Satisfaction in Kinmen

National Park, Taiwan

Chien Min Chen1,*, Hong Tau Lee2, Sheu Hua Chen3 and Tsun Hung Huang4

1 Department of Tourism Management, National Kinmen (Quemoy) University, Kinmen, Taiwan

2 Department of Industrial Engineering & Management, National Chinyi University of Technology, Taichung County, Taiwan

3 Department of Distribution Management, National Chinyi University of Technology, Taichung County, Taiwan

4 Department of Industrial Engineering & Management, National Chinyi University of Technology, Taichung County, Taiwan

*Correspondence to: Prof Chien Min Chen, Department

of Tourism Management, National Kinmen (Quemoy)

University, No 1 University Road, Jinning, Kinmen,

Taiwan.

E-mail: james@nqu.edu.tw

characteristics of the competitiveness

perspec-tives is its emphasis on resources as a

funda-mental determinant of fi rm performance

(Dierickx and Cool, 1989; Rumelt et al., 1991)

Besides, Ritchie and Crouch (2003) noted that

the competitiveness of a destination is its ability

to increase tourists’ expenditure and to attract

increasing numbers of visitors to the

destina-tion while providing them with quality services

and satisfying experiences It is thus important

to explore tourist satisfaction with the

destina-tion as well as the service quality, which are

associated with tourist behavioural intentions

According to the extant literature, the

primary and sub-dimensions of service quality

have been identifi ed for a variety of industries

such as the education, health care, retailing,

tourism, telecommunication, technology,

transport and recreational sports sectors using

a hierarchical model as a framework (Brady et

al., 2001; Collins, 2005; Jones, 2005; Caro and

Roemer, 2006; Fassnacht and Koese, 2006;

Kang, 2006; Clemes et al., 2007; Dagger et al.,

2007; Kao, 2007; Caro and Garcia, 2007, 2008)

Yet there are few models applied to empirical

studies of national parks Therefore, this

research focuses on tourists visiting Kinmen

National Park, evaluates dimensions and

sub-dimensions of service quality and ascertains

tourist satisfaction with the attributes of service

quality and their willingness of repeat visits

and recommendation The objectives of this

study are fourfold: (i) to identify the

dimen-sions of service quality as perceived by tourists

in the National Park; (ii) to identify the

sub-dimensions for the service quality as perceived

by tourists in the National Park; (iii) to examine

the interrelationships between service quality

and satisfaction and customer loyalty related

to behavioural intentions as perceived by

tour-ists in the National Park; and (iv) to examine

the effects of demographic factors on

behav-ioural intentions as perceived by tourists in the

National Park The results of this research may

contribute to the validity and applicability of

the model to the tourism development

evolu-tion of naevolu-tional parks

KINMEN NATIONAL PARK: AN OVERVIEW

Kinmen, also known as Quemoy in some

Western countries, is a small island located off

the southeastern coast of China cally, Kinmen lies opposite Xiamen City in China’s Fujian Province During the Cold War Era, the Nationalist (Kuomintang) Army retreated from mainland China to Taiwan in a civil war and was stationed in Kinmen (of Taiwan) Since 1949, battles or confl icts have occasionally occurred between the People’s Liberation Army and the Nationalist Army Meanwhile, the order of martial laws was implemented on the Island, and not until 1993 was the ban on tourists from Taiwan to Kinmen lifted Since then, Kinmen has developed tourism as an economical development approach, with 450 000 tourists visiting the island for sight seeing the battlefi elds (Chen

Geographi-and Henning, 2004; Chen et al., 2009a).

Over 40 years of military administration has hampered the pace of Kinmen’s urbanization; however, this has enabled its historical heri-tage and war culture to be well preserved As

a result, historical relics and warfare reserves are the main resources of tourism on the Island

(Chen et al., 2010) Aiming to conserve a

com-bined war history, heritage of cultures and natural resources, Kinmen National Park was established on the island in 1995 (Figure 1) As one of the seven national parks in Taiwan, Kinmen National Park has rich warfare history and cultural assets that forge distinctive char-acteristics and promise a competitive insight Comprising one-third of the Island, Kinmen Nation Park is 3720 hectares in dimension, and

is divided into four areas — scenic area, toric area, recreational area and limited area for reconstruction, according to the regulation of the National Park Act of Taiwan (Kinmen National Park, 2008) Overall, Kinmen National Park is unique in that it is the fi rst national park in Taiwan with focus on preservation of historical sites, war monuments and natural resources, and therefore the Taiwanese govern-ment has taken steps to preserve the Park’s cultural sites, war reserves and primitive and pristine zones so that visitors can observe its vibrant landscape

his-LITERATURE REVIEWIntentions to perform a behaviour, such as a purchase or consumption behaviour, have been widely investigated in the marketing

literature (Gabler and Jones, 2000) Generally,

customer behavioural intentions involve

sig-nifi cant decision-marking, particularly in

repurchase decisions (White and Yu, 2005) In

the context of behavioural intentions, customer

satisfaction has been related according to the

literature (Dabholkar and Thorpe, 1994; Kang

et al., 2004; Lin and Hsieh, 2007; Clemes et al.,

2008; Pollack, 2009) Furthermore, customer

satisfaction has been suggested as having a

direct impact on behavioural intentions in the

airline, restaurant, technology and tourism

sectors (Birgelen et al., 2006; Chen and Tsai,

2007; Namkung and Jang, 2007; Bosque and

Martin, 2008; Chen, 2008; Ladhari et al., 2008)

In highly competitive markets, customer

satis-faction is a key driver of performance, making

its measurement and management crucial

(Matzler et al., 2008) From the empirical

per-spectives, for example, a structural equation

modelling analysis reveals that attendee

evalu-ation of festival quality positively infl uences

satisfaction with the festival and that

satisfac-tion exerts a positive and direct infl uence on

awareness of quality Further, festival quality appears not to directly affect behavioural intentions, whereas satisfaction and awareness have positive and direct relationships with intentions (Yuan and Jang, 2008)

On the other hand, it is noted that comfort, familiar environmental ambience and compat-ible environmental values are some of the issues that will enhance tourists’ emotional satisfaction (Okello and Yerian, 2009) Bosque and Martin (2008) showed that tourism satis-faction consists of attitudes and prior beliefs, post-experience assessments and future behav-ioural intentions However, the actual factors that enhance tourist joy include a relaxed, familiar and comfortable environment, which can be subtle and not obvious, and so this needs a strong appreciation of consumer behaviour and needs (Decrop, 1999) These notions connote the importance of service quality and the relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction Basically, satisfaction can be defi ned as ‘a judgement that

a product, or service feature, or the product or

Figure 1 Location of the Kinmen National Park

service itself, provides a pleasurable level of

consumption-related fulfi llment, including

levels of under or over fulfi llment’ (Oliver,

19 97) It has been recognized that tourism

sat-isfaction level can be attributed to different

destination attributes including tangible

prod-ucts and prices to intangible service quality

(Lounsbury and Hoopes, 1985; Stevens, 1992;

Crompton and Love, 1995; Qu and Li, 1997;

Ryan, 1999; Yu and Goulden, 2006) Tourist

sat-isfaction therefore encompasses all activities

tourists participate in while staying at a

desti-nation, and their perceptions of service quality

(Whipple and Thach, 1988; Murphy and

Pritchard, 1997; Augustyn and Ho, 1998; Hsu,

2003; Yu and Goulden, 2006) Furthermore, as

suggested by Hui et al (2007), quality services

and tourist satisfaction develop long-term

rela-tionship with tourists and in turn bring about

destination loyalty It is also elucidated by

Campo and Yagüe (2008) that perceived quality

is the primary antecedent of tourist loyalty to

tour operator In this sense, customers’

attitu-dinal loyalty to a brand can be strengthened by

their satisfaction with the brand (Li and Petrick,

2008) Therefore, providing high-quality

service and ensuring customer satisfaction are

widely recognized as important factors leading

to the success of the tourism industries (Stevens

et al., 1995).

However important the concept of service

quality has been, limited research has addressed

the structure and antecedents of the concept

(Wilkins et al., 2006) Gronroos (1984) adapted

the disconfi rmation paradigm to the

measure-ment of service quality, in addition to his

prop-osition of a two-dimensional model to measure

service quality The fi rst dimension, technical

quality, referred to the outcome of the service

performance The second dimension,

func-tional quality, was interpreted as the subjective

perception of the way the service was

deliv-ered More recently, Ko and Pastore (2005)

developed a hierarchical model by adapting

Brady and Cronin’s (2001) and Dabholkar

et al.’s (1996) models, using it in their study of

service quality in the recreational sports

indus-try The model consisted of four primary

dimensions, some of which have the following

sub-dimensions: (i) interaction quality: client–

employee interaction and inter-client

interac-tion; (ii) environmental quality: ambient

condition, design and equipment; (iii) gramme quality: operating time, information and range of activity programmes; and (iv) outcome quality: valence, physical change and sociability (Ko and Pastore, 2005, p 91) In line with the aforementioned model, Shonk (2006,

pro-p 21) applied a hierarchical model to the study

of service quality for sports tourism industry The model comprised four primary dimen-sions and a number of relevant sub-dimen-sions, namely: (i) access to the destination where the event occurred; (ii) the venue for the event; (iii) the accommodation during the stay; and (iv) the sport contest As a consequence, these two models supported the multidimen-sional conceptualization of service quality in the recreational sports industry, and suggested that satisfaction with the event infl uenced the tourists’ intentions to return to the event

In terms of applying a hierarchical ling approach to conceptualize service quality

model-in a variety of different areas, a hierarchical model refl ecting service quality perceptions in the health care industry was explored by

Dagger et al (2007, p 131) The model

encom-passed four primary dimensions: interpersonal quality, technical quality, environment quality and administrative quality To each aforemen-tioned dimension, several sub-dimensions were attached respectively, namely: (1) interac-tion and relationship; (ii) outcome and exper-tise; (iii) atmosphere and tangibles; and (iv) timeliness, operation and support The study applying the model concluded that satisfaction was typically modelled as mediating the link between service quality and behavioural inten-tions and that customers’ overall perceptions

of service quality continued to play an tant role in generating customer outcomes

impor-(Dagger et al., 2007) The study results were

highly similar to those presented by Clemes

et al (2007), whose hierarchical model to refl ect

service quality perceptions in the higher cation industry was developed The hierarchi-cal model of higher education service quality contained three primary dimensions: interac-tion quality, physical environment quality and outcome quality Each primary dimension was made up of at least three sub-dimensions For instance, interaction quality was composed of four sub-dimensions: academic staff, adminis-tration staff, academic staff availability and

edu-course content Physical environment quality

comprised three sub-dimensions: library

atmo-sphere, physical appeal and social factors

Outcome quality was composed of personal

development, academic development and

career opportunity (Clemes et al., 2007, p 310)

The results of the empirical study

reempha-sized the application of a hierarchical factor

structure, such as those developed by Clemes

et al (2007), Brady and Cronin (2001), and

Dabholkar et al (1996) to conceptualize and

measure service quality

More fundamentally, in the context of

tourism industry, Caro and Roemer (2006)

pro-posed an integrated model of service quality in

an attempt to fi ll a gap in the literature on

service quality The model was developed in

accordance with the hierarchy of perceptions

as proposed by Brady and Cronin (2001) The

model was made up of three primary

dimen-sions, namely, personal interaction, physical

environment and outcome, which were divided

into seven sub-dimensions respectively:

conduct, expertise, problem solving,

equip-ment, ambient conditions, waiting time and

value In this regard, the conceptualization of

a multidimensional service quality perception

was established according to the results of

their study

To sum up, the issue of behavioural

inten-tions has received considerable attention in

different areas; however, there are few studies

in the tourism fi eld conducted to combine

identifi able variables in relation to service

quality and customer satisfaction into a model

Nonetheless, it is noted that by investigating

the relationship between importance and

sat-isfaction from the perspective of tourists,

Truong and King (2009) examined a number of

variables, including socio-demographics and

travel characteristics, and compared the

impor-tance that travellers attach to various

destina-tion attributes with their associated satisfacdestina-tion

with the destination’s various tourism

prod-ucts In addition, Nowacki (2009) attempted to

verify a model of relations between

motiva-tion, quality of product of attracmotiva-tion, benefi ts,

satisfaction and behavioural intentions of

visit-ing people Mak et al (2010) also examined the

factors affecting the service quality of the tour

guiding profession In their research, the factors

identifi ed were classifi ed into six categories:

unhealthy business practices, market tion, immaturity of tourist market, changing tourist behaviour, intense competition between inbound tour operators and human resource issues The extant literature, in this regard, presents the relevant theories regarding the conceptualization of behavioural intentions and the related constructs, and provides the foundation for the development of the model

to Kinmen National Park The tered survey consisted of four sections The

self-adminis-fi rst section comprised demographic variables

to determine the demographics of the tourists, including elements of tourists’ age, gender, education, personal income and occupation The second section of the questionnaire was designed to determine the vacation behaviour and decision-making process of the tourists, including purposes of trip, times of visiting, duration of trip, information sources (Clawson and Knetsch, 1966; Cooper, 1993) Moreover, it

is acknowledged that if performance is quate, customers will be satisfi ed (Johnston, 1995) and that any increase in performance leads to an increase in perceptions of service quality and, conversely, any reduction in the level of performance will result in reduced per-ceptions of service quality (Johnston and Lyth, 1988; Gronroos, 1993) Therefore, the third section of the questionnaire was designed to determine tourists’ satisfaction with the service quality of the Kinmen National Park on a fi ve-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (very dissatisfi ed) to 5 (very satisfi ed) Lastly, as it is noted that customer loyalty is infl uenced by customer satisfaction (Bitner, 1990) and simi-larly customer satisfaction is a signifi cant deter-minant of repeat sales and customer loyalty (Anderson and Sullivan, 1993; Liljander and Strandvik, 1995; Anderson, 1998), the need for further study on the link between overall satis-faction and customer loyalty is of great impor-tance The fourth section of the questionnaire

ade-contains questions about tourists’ future

inten-tion to visit and recommend the Kinmen

National Park, based on the fi ve-point scale

ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly

agree)

In understanding the elements of service

quality, a hierarchical model of behavioural

intentions was developed to measure the

deter-minants of service quality dimensions of the

Kinmen National Park Meanwhile, a research

framework was thus developed to make a

guideline of the research (see Figure 2) Then,

a set of service quality dimensions specifi c to

the National Park was identifi ed based on the

literature review, the focus group interviews

and some destination resources of Kinmen

elaborated by Chen and Henning, and Chen et

al (2004, 2009b, 2010) In the process of focus

group interviews, the authors conducted three

mini focus groups for this study Each group

comprised fi ve participants including tourists,

tour guides, local professors and government

offi cials in charge of tourism or national park

affairs The group members were encouraged

to list all of the factors that might encompass

their perceptions of the service quality of

national parks Then, the authors summarized

the discussion, drew inferences and

catego-rized their opinions More specifi cally, four

primary dimensions were eventually

identi-fi ed, namely personal interaction, physical environment, technical quality and access quality Furthermore, eight sub-dimensions pertaining to the primary dimensions were also identifi ed, including personnel service, interpretation service, physical facilities, envi-ronment quality, recreational facilities, venue quality, convenience quality and information quality Table 1 provides a summary of con-structs and a synopsis of the items used in each construct operationalization

In addition, the authors tried some practical data analysis techniques such as descriptive statistics analysis, multiple regression and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) for the assessment of attributes within tourists’ satis-faction and willingness Being explanatory and descriptive in nature, this study is mainly based on quantitative methodology to investi-gate the relationship between different con-structs postulated in Figure 2 Due to time and human resource limitations, a convenience sampling method was chosen Data collection used airport departure survey procedures (Kozak and Rimmington, 2000) The sample was taken in the departure lounge at Kinmen Airport from July to September in 2009 Tour-ists had just completed their visit to Kinmen National Park and their perceptions of the attractions, facilities and customer services were not obliterated out of mind After distrib-uting a total of 900 questionnaires over the 10-week period, 700 questionnaires were col-lected There were 200 non-participants Of the

700 returned questionnaires, 84 were plete with more than 10% of the questions unanswered The usable and effective ques-tionnaires for this study were 616, representing

incom-a response rincom-ate of 68% The questionnincom-aire wincom-as tested for reliability and generated good results, since the Cronbach’s coeffi cient alpha scores as high as 0.969 (>0.60), as suggested by Churchill (1979)

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Respondent demographics

The usable questionnaires were evenly uted to 616 respondents, representing 51% male and 49% female of the surveyed tourists respectively Most of the visitors were in the

distrib-Figure 2 Hierarchical model of national park

behavioural intentions — the main determinants

age group of 21–30 years, representing 41.2%

of the respondents Respondents younger than

20 years of age were few, accounting for only

10.9% of the respondents Most of the tourists’

professional backgrounds included business

(23.5%), academia (23.1%) and technicians

(18.0%) In addition, the survey revealed that

the education level of tourists to Kinmen

National Park was relatively high, with 61.9%

having earned college degrees and 7.6%

grad-uate or doctoral degrees Only 8.4% of

respon-dents were either secondary school educated

or below With regard to personal annual

income measured in NT$ (New Taiwanese

Dollars), the survey revealed that 40.3% of the

visitors reported less than NT$19 999 and

17.2% indicated a monthly income between NT$20 000 and NT$29 999 (Table 2)

Trip characteristics and tourists’ motivation

Tourists’ trip characteristics and motivation are also summarized in the underlying tables

It is seen in Table 2 that 44.8% of the tourists visited Kinmen National Park for the fi rst time, while 32.5% of the tourists visited the Park for four times and above More than half of the tourists chose to stay in Kinmen National Park for 3 days and more, accounting for 68.3% of the respondents It is interesting to note that the reasons for tourists to visit the National Park are mainly leisure, educational and VFR

Table 1 Construct operationalization

Employees’ service behaviourEmployees’ problem-solving skillsEmployees’ interaction with the touristsInter-client interaction, sociability

Employees’ willingness, friendliness and understandability

Auxiliary interpretation such as books, brochures and pamphlets

Equipment of the parkGuide plate qualityFacilities for the handicapped

Ambient conditionsAttractions of the parkTourists’ perceptions of the park environment quality

Secure recreational facilities

VQ Noticeable and accessible fi re system

Safety of tourOperating timeMaintenance of the park

Convenience of food and beverage facilitiesConvenience and hygiene of restrooms

IQ Availability of information resources

Range of activity programmes

PS, personnel service; IS, interpretation service; PF, physical facilities; EQ, environment quality; RF recreational facilities;

VQ, venue quality; CQ, convenience quality; IQ, information quality.

(visiting friends and relatives) respectively

accounting for 37.3%, 24.5% and 21.7%

Infor-mation resources for tourists to learn about the

National Park are, ranking in order, travel

agency (24.4%), Internet (19.9%), books or

magazines (18.7%) and word of mouth (18.2%)

Tourists’ information and customer satisfaction

In order to understand the relationship between tourists’ information and their satisfaction with the main determinants of the Kinmen

Table 2 General information about tourists

National Park, the authors employed one-way

ANOVA to analyse the differences As a result,

there were no signifi cant differences between

customer satisfaction and tourists’ information

regarding age, monthly income, times of

visit-ing and length of stay However, there were

signifi cant differences between customer

satis-faction and tourists’ information with

refer-ence to their educational background and

occupation One-way ANOVA and post hoc

analysis using the Scheffe test revealed that

customers with bachelor’s degree were more

satisfi ed than those who had, ranking in order,

high school, junior high and below, and

mas-ter’s and PhD degrees With respect to tourists’

information regarding occupation, the results

showed that those who had occupations of

academics, including the occupations of

edu-cator, student and researcher were more

satisfi ed than businesspeople and the rest of

occupations (see Table 3)

Multiple regression results relating to the

main determinants

The regression model for analysing the

rela-tionship between customer satisfaction and the

main determinants has been employed using

customer satisfaction as dependent variable

and four main determinants as independent

variables Four main determinants relating to

dependent variables were identifi ed as

per-sonal interaction, physical environment,

tech-nical quality and access quality The results are

presented in Table 4–7

The fi rst regression model takes personal

interaction as the independent variable and

tourist satisfaction as the dependent variable

The results were presented in Table 4 As a

result, the standardized coeffi cient beta (β) was

0.650 (p ≤ 0.05) Further, the F statistic of 449.534

was signifi cant at 5% level of signifi cance,

revealing that the model helped to explain

some of the variation in personal interaction

Besides, the adjusted coeffi cient of

determina-tion (Adjusted R2) revealed that 42.2% of the

variance in personal interaction was explained

by the regression model The p-values of the

ttests were less than the 5% level of signifi

-cance, indicating that the beta coeffi cients were

signifi cant Accordingly, the results signifi ed a

positive relationship between tourist

satisfac-tion and personal interacsatisfac-tion, supporting the surmise in the research framework that higher satisfaction of each personal interaction sub-dimension positively affects personal interaction

The second regression model takes physical environment as the independent variable and tourist satisfaction as the dependent variable

As a consequence, Table 5 illustrated that the standardized coeffi cient beta (β) was 0.566

(p ≤ 0.05) Further, the F statistic of 287.775 was signifi cant at 5% level of signifi cance, revealing that the model helped to explain some of the variation in physical environ-ment Besides, the adjusted coeffi cient of

determination (Adjusted R2) revealed that 31.9% of the variance in physical environment was explained by the regression model The

p-values of the t-tests were less than the 5%

level of signifi cance, indicating that the beta coeffi cients were signifi cant Accordingly, the results signifi ed a positive relationship between tourist satisfaction and physical envi-ronment, supporting the surmise in the research framework that higher satisfaction of each physical environment sub-dimension positively affects physical environment

The third regression model takes technical quality as the independent variable and tourist satisfaction as the dependent variable The results were presented in Table 6 As a result, the standardized coeffi cient beta (β) was 0.577

(p ≤ 0.05) Further, the F statistic of 306.044 was

signifi cant at the 5% level of signifi cance, revealing that the model helped to explain some of the variation in technical quality Besides, the adjusted coeffi cient of determina-

tion (Adjusted R2) revealed that 33.2% of the variance in technical quality was explained by

the regression model The p-values of the t-tests

were less than the 5% level of signifi cance, indicating that the beta coeffi cients were sig-nifi cant Accordingly, the results signifi ed a positive relationship between tourist satisfac-tion and technical quality, supporting the surmise in the research framework that higher satisfaction of each technical quality sub-dimension positively affects technical quality.The fourth regression model takes access quality as the independent variable and tourist satisfaction as the dependent variable The results of regression model revealed that there

Table 3 Relationship between tourists’ information and customer satisfaction

f-value p-value

Age 1 20 years and under Interpretation service

Recreational facilitiesConvenience qualityEnvironment qualityPhysical facilitiesVenue qualityPersonnel serviceInformation quality

1.4552.0191.4494.8484.5992.1035.3514.119

0.2260.1100.2270.0020.0030.0990.0010.007

2.8052.1500.8463.5415.1584.5648.1727.582

0.0390.0930.4690.0140.0020.0040.0000.000

1.6151.0011.5992.3382.7942.1292.9243.456

0.0980.4410.1030.0100.0020.0210.0010.000

5 > 2 > 1,3,4,6

2 Business

3 Tourism service industry

4 Government

5 Academics

6 OthersMonthly

income

1 19 999NT$ and under Interpretation service

Recreational facilitiesConvenience qualityEnvironment qualityPhysical facilitiesVenue qualityPersonnel serviceInformation quality

1.1600.9521.1811.7412.3590.7801.4612.624

0.3240.4660.3110.0970.0220.6040.1780.011

visiting

Recreational facilitiesConvenience qualityEnvironment qualityPhysical facilitiesVenue qualityPersonnel serviceInformation quality

2.0042.2901.5151.8103.7762.8972.7564.919

0.1120.0770.2090.1440.0110.0350.0420.002

2.4172.4771.1721.2632.8132.5715.7104.381

0.0650.0600.3200.2860.0390.0530.0010.005

2 1 day

3 2 days

4 3 days and above

Table 6 Multiple regression results relating to technical quality

coeffi cient beta

Table 5 Multiple regression results relating to physical environment

coeffi cient beta

Table 4 Multiple regression results relating to personal interaction

coeffi cient beta

Table 7 Multiple regression results relating to access quality

coeffi cient beta

was a signifi cant relationship pertaining to

access quality As shown in Table 7, the

stan-dardized coeffi cient beta (β) was 0.531 (p ≤

0.05) Further, the F statistic of 240.883 was

sig-nifi cant at the 5% level of sigsig-nifi cance,

reveal-ing that the model helped to explain some of

the variation in access quality Besides, the

adjusted coeffi cient of determination (Adjusted

R2) revealed that 28.1% of the variance in access

quality was explained by the regression model

The p-values of the t-tests were less than the

5% level of signifi cance, indicating that the

beta coeffi cients were signifi cant Accordingly,

the results signifi ed a positive relationship

between tourist satisfaction and access quality,

supporting the surmise in the research

frame-work that higher satisfaction of each access

quality sub-dimension positively affects access

quality

Customer satisfaction and loyalty leads

to intentions of recommendation and

repeat visits

Customer satisfaction is essential to corporate

survival (Pizam and Ellis, 1999), and has

gen-erally been found to lead to positive

behav-ioural intentions such as return, repurchase

and purchase recommendation in many

tourism and hospitality studies (Dube et al.,

1994; Bojanic, 1996) Furthermore, it has become

increasingly recognized that satisfaction

derived may be part of a longer term

relation-ship with place and/or activity through

theo-ries of involvement (McIntyre, 1989) and repeat

purchase or consumer loyalty (Chioveanu,

2008) Although the overlapping concepts of

customer satisfaction and service quality are

based upon the relationship between

expecta-tions and percepexpecta-tions (Churchill and

Surpre-nant, 1982), quality service performance and

tourist satisfaction develop a long-term

rela-tionship with tourists and in turn bring about

destination loyalty (Hui et al., 2007) In this

sense, providing high-quality service and

ensuring customer satisfaction are widely

rec-ognized as important factors leading to the

success of the tourism industries (Stevens et al.,

1995) Therefore, measuring customer

satisfac-tion is an important task for tourism marketers

to carry out as it is directly linked to repeat

business (Wong and Law, 2003)

For a further understanding of tourist faction and customer loyalty that leads to the intentions of recommendation and repeat visits, tourists’ overall satisfaction and willing-ness to revisit and recommend the destination were explored The values of mean and stan-dard deviation were calculated The measure-ment was based on the mean scores on a Likert scale from 1 to 5 (very dissatisfi ed to very satis-

satis-fi ed, or strongly disagree to strongly agree) to assess the satisfaction or the willingness index

of the respondents, and the survey results were presented in Table 8 As the result revealed, the respondents gave ratings in proportion as high

as 80% approximately with respect to their overall satisfaction and willingness to revisit and recommend the Kinmen National Park More fundamentally, tourists’ overall satisfac-tion with the National Park totaled a majority

of 81.1% (‘very satisfi ed’ plus ‘satisfi ed’) respondents (Mean = 4.13), and their willing-ness to revisit and to recommend the destina-tion totaled about the same respectively representing 79.7% and 78.0% of the respon-dents (Mean = 4.15 respectively)

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONSThe study adapted a model to gain an empiri-cal understanding of behavioural intentions in relation to service quality and tourist satisfac-tion in the Taiwan national park sector, using Kinmen National Park as an example As a consequence, the model proved to be useful for the Taiwan study as well as the national park research around the world The literature review, the questionnaire survey and the sta-tistical analyses provide support for the pres-ence of a hierarchical model of national park behavioural intentions and for four main determinants relating to dependent variables identifi ed as personal interaction, physical environment, technical quality and access quality Furthermore, the study has identifi ed the sub-dimensions for the service quality as perceived by tourists at Kinmen National Park, namely personnel service, interpretation service, physical facilities, environment quality, recreational facilities, venue quality, conve-nience quality and information quality

Moreover, this research also provided

a framework for understanding the

interrelationships between tourist behavioural

intentions and the other constructs in relation

to behavioural intentions Apparently, this

research adds empirical support to this vein of

literature and has tested and verifi ed the four

main determinants and the sub-dimensions as

important constructs for service quality in

national parks In the study, the survey results

illustrated a positive relationship between

tourist satisfaction and the four main

determi-nants of service quality supporting the

concep-tual model of the research that service quality

positively affects higher satisfaction The

posi-tive relationship that was identifi ed between

personal interaction and tourist satisfaction

may be interpreted as the higher the personal

interaction, as perceived by the tourists, the

more satisfi ed the tourists The same results

may also refer to the other three determinants

that the higher the physical environment

(tech-nical quality, access quality), as perceived by

the tourists, the more satisfi ed the tourists All

these fi ndings may result in an interpretation

that service quality acts as an antecedent of

customer satisfaction Furthermore, the results

of the study are consistent with the notion that

high-quality services will naturally increase

the quality of the trip, which will lead to high

tourist satisfaction, as suggested by Chen and Tsai (2007)

The constructs in this study were also assessed based on the perceptions of the demographic groups First, the results revealed that tourists with bachelor’s degree were more satisfi ed than the rest of respondents Second, the results showed that the occupation group also had perceptual differences In particular, tourists working as educators, students and researchers had higher indices of satisfaction than business-people and the rest of others The results imply that different educational levels and occupa-tional types of tourists may demand different levels of service quality and may have different post-visit assessment of whether the service quality outcome is acceptable or unacceptable

In addition, the results of the study also found that general satisfaction levels were high, and tourist loyalty and future intentions

by recommending or repeat visits were ingly rather high The positive relationship between tourist satisfaction and intentions to recommend and to revisit may be interpreted

accord-as satisfi ed customers having favourable behavioural intentions to revisit or return to the same destination after having experienced high service quality, hence producing customer

Table 8 Tourist overall satisfaction and willingness to recommending and revisiting Kinmen National Park

loyalty It can be concluded therefore that

sat-isfaction has positive and direct relationships

with intentions of recommendation and repeat

revisits

It is worth noting that tourist perceptions of

service quality and satisfactions are important

constructs in a framework of analysis towards

tourist intentions combining elements such as

expectation and consumption experiences, as

exemplifi ed by a number of researchers (Engel

et al., 1993; Spreng et al., 1996; Chen and Tsai,

2007; Bosque and Martin, 2008) Although

dif-ferent researchers have included difdif-ferent

vari-ables of service quality in their studies, this

study specifi cally placed tourist perceptions of

service quality (access quality, technical quality,

physical environment and personal

interac-tion) under indicators that affect the

satisfac-tion of a nasatisfac-tional park It can be concluded,

according to the survey results, that measuring

factors such as service quality, satisfaction and

customer loyalty from different angles is an

important task to further establish tourist

awareness and image for national parks This

concept reconfi rms the extant literature that

tourist perceptions and satisfaction may result

in destination loyalty that leads to the success

of the tourism industries, as it is directly linked

to sustainable business

From managerial perspectives, although

some studies argued that there was no direct

relationship between tourist satisfaction and

most attractions, facilities and services (Okello

and Yerian, 2009), customer satisfaction

depends on service quality and high levels of

quality, if customers believe that perceived

value is being enhanced (Caruana et al., 2000)

The results of the study, consistent with the

notion of Dagger et al (2007), can be attributed

to one fact that managers should consider both

the service quality and customer satisfaction

constructs as determinants of behavioural

intentions In light of the results, national park

managers have to satisfy the tourists with a

high level of service quality because service

quality may have a signifi cant infl uence on

long-term behavioural intentions through high

levels of customer satisfaction

However, even if intuitively high levels of

customer satisfaction should lead to higher

levels of customer retention, simply having

satisfi ed customers is not enough (Hui et al.,

2007) Customer loyalty can not be ignored As tourists who have enjoyed better than expected experiences are more likely to return in the future (Ross, 1993), it is vital for national park managers to gain a competitive advantage over regional or international competitors through improving customer impressions to develop destination branding image In recent years, the authorities involved have been endeavouring to promote Kinmen National Park to the international community focusing

on culture and heritage development (Chen and Henning, 2004) It is suggested that con-sumer indifference may result in a situation where customers are satisfi ed (Solomon, 2002), highlighting the need to adopt innovative approaches to the management of tourist attractions and provide different interpreta-tions for different visitors Therefore, the tourism planning of Kinmen National Park requires market segmentation and more inte-grated resources strategies in its tourism devel-opment for a more competitive and sustainable position For example, the managerial sectors may consider more strategies to enhance the interests of the tourists with low indices of sat-isfaction, such as the businesspeople and those who have master’s or PhD degrees

It is argued that a formative measurement based on multiple regression analysis exam-ines only how dimensions of service quality infl uence the service quality construct (Dia-mantopoulos and Winklhofer, 2001) Further, the primary dimensions and sub-dimensions should be identifi ed using an appropriate qualitative and quantitative analysis regarding service quality and satisfaction because they may also vary across industries and cultures

(Clemes et al., 2007) Although this study adds

a number of important concepts to the extant literature and provides important contribu-tions for national parks management, it is sug-gested that future research may be directed at adopting a refl ective measurement using a structural equation model or different method-ology combining a qualitative one

REFERENCES

Anderson EW 1998 Customer satisfaction and

word of mouth Journal of Services Research 1(1):

5–17

Anderson EW, Sullivan MW 1993 The antecedents

and consequences of customer satisfaction for

fi rms Marketing Science 12(2): 125–143.

Augustyn M, Ho SK 1998 Service quality and

tourism Journal of Travel Research 37(1): 71–75.

Barros CP 2005 Evaluating the effi ciency of a small

hotel chain with a Malmquist productivity index

International Journal of Tourism Research 7(3):

173–184

Birgelen M van., Jong A de., Ruyter K de 2006

Multi-channel service retailing: the effects of

channel performance satisfaction on behavioural

intentions Journal of Retailing 82(4): 367–377.

Bitner MJ 1990 Evaluating service encounters:

the effects of physical surroundings and employee

responses Journal of Marketing 54(1): 69–82.

Bojanic DC 1996 Consumer perceptions of price,

value and satisfaction in the hotel industry: an

exploratory study Journal of Hospitality and Leisure

Marketing 14(1): 5–22.

Bosque IRD, Martin HS 2008 Tourist satisfaction a

cognitive-affective model Annals of Tourism

Research 35(2): 551–573.

Brady MK, Cronin JJ 2001 Some new thoughts on

conceptualizing perceived service: a hierarchical

approach Journal of Marketing 65(3): 34–49.

Brady MK, Robertson CJ, Cronin JJ 2001 Managing

behavioural intentions in diverse cultural

envi-ronments: an investigation of service quality,

service value, and satisfaction for American and

Ecuadorian fast-food customers Journal of

Inter-national Management 7(2): 129–149.

Campo S, Yagüe MJ 2008 Tourist loyalty to tour

operator: effects of price promotions and tourist

effort Journal of Travel Research 46(3): 318–326.

Caro LM, Garcia JAM 2008 Developing a

multi-dimensional and hierarchical service quality

model for the travel agency industry Tourism

Management 29(4): 706–720.

Caro LM, Garcia JAM 2007 Measuring perceived

service quality in urgent transport service Journal

of Retailing and Consumer Services 14(1): 60–72.

Caro LM, Roemer E 2006 Developing a

multi-dimensional and hierarchical service quality model

for the travel and tourism industry (Working

Paper Rep No 06/18) Bradford University:

Bradford, UK

Caruana A, Money AH, Berthon PR 2000 Service

quality and satisfaction: the moderating role of

value European Journal of Marketing 34(11/12):

1338–1353

Chen CF 2008 Investigating structural

relation-ships between service quality, perceived value,

satisfaction, and behavioural intentions for air

passengers: evidence from Taiwan Transportation

Chinese tourists to Kinmen International Journal

Chioveanu I 2008 Advertising, brand loyalty and

pricing Games and Economic Behavior 64(1): 68–80.

Churchill GA 1979 A paradigm for developing

better measures of marketing constructs Journal

of Marketing Research 16(1): 64–73.

Churchill GA, Surprenant C 1982 An investigation into the determinants of customer satisfaction

Journal of Marketing Research 19(4): 491–504.

Clawson M, Knetsch JL 1966 Economics of Outdoor Recreation The John Hopkins Press: Baltimore,

MD

Clemes MD, Gan CEC, Kao TH 2007 University

student satisfaction: an empirical analysis Journal

of Marketing for Higher Education 17(2): 292–325.

Clemes MD, Gan CEC, Kao TH, Choong M 2008

An empirical analysis of customer satisfaction in

international air travel Innovative Marketing 4(1):

Dabholkar PA, Thorpe DI 1994 Does customer

sat-isfaction predict shopper intentions Journal of Consumer Satisfaction, Dissatisfaction and Com-

plaining Behaviour 7: 161–171.

Dabholkar PA, Thorpe DI, Rentz JO 1996 A measure

of service quality for retail stores: scale

develop-ment and validation Journal of the Academy of

Marketing Science 24(1): 3–16.

Dagger TS, Sweeney JC, Johnson LW 2007 A

hierarchical model of health service quality:

scale development and investigation of an

integrated model Journal of Service Research 10(2):

123–142

Decrop A 1999 Tourists’ decision-making and

behavior processes In Consumer Behavior in Travel

and Tourism, Pizam A, Mansfi eld Y (eds) Haworth:

New York; 103–133

Diamantopoulos A, Winklhofer HM 2001 Index

construction with formative indicators: an

alter-native to scale development Journal of Marketing

Research 38(2): 269–277.

Dierickx I, Cool K 1989 Asset stock accumulation

and sustainability of competitive advantage

Management Science 35(12): 1504–1511.

Dube L, Renaghan LM, Miller JM 1994 Measuring

customer satisfaction for strategic management

The Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration

Quarterly 35(1): 39–47.

Engel J, Blackwell R, Miniard P 1993 Consumer

Behaviour Dryden Press: Orlando, FL.

Fassnacht M, Koese I 2006 Quality of electronic

services: conceptualising and testing a

hierarchical model Journal of Service Research

9(1): 19–37

Gabler J, Jones MY 2000 Behaviour and Behavioural

Intentions in a Retail Setting Available at http://

smib.vuw.ac.nz:8081/www/ANZMAC2000/

CDsite/papers/g/Gabler.PDF (accessed 26

Feb-ruary 2010)

Gronroos C 1984 A service quality model and its

marketing implications European Journal of

Mar-keting 18(4): 36–44.

Gronroos C 1993 Toward a third phase in service

quality research: challenges and future directions

In Advances in Services Marketing and Management,

2nd edn, Swartz TA, Bowen DA, Brown SW (eds)

JAI Press: Greenwich, CT; 49–64

Hsu C 2003 Mature motorcoach travelers’

satisfac-tion: a preliminary step toward measurement

development Journal of Hospitality and Tourism

Research 27(3): 291–309.

Hui TK, Wan D, Ho A 2007 Tourists’ satisfaction,

recommendation and revisiting Singapore

Tou rism Management 28(4): 965–975.

Johnston R 1995 Managing the zone of tolerance:

some propositions International Journal of Service

Industry Management 6(2): 46–61.

Johnston R, Lyth D 1988 Service quality: integrating

customer expectations and operational capability In

the proceedings of the QUIS Symposium,

Univer-sity of Karlstad: Sweden (15 August)

Jones ET 2005 The importance of communication

quality in services Unpublished master’s thesis,

Florida State University: Tallahassee

Kang GD 2006 The hierarchical structure of service quality: integration of technical and

functional quality Managing Service Quality

16(1): 37–50

Kang SS, Okamoto N, Donovan HA 2004 Service quality and its effect on customer satisfaction and customer behavioural intentions: hotel and

ryokan guests in Japan Asia Pacifi c Journal of

Tourism Research 9(2): 189–202.

Kao TH 2007 University Student satisfaction: an empirical analysis Unpublished master’s thesis,

Lincoln University: Canterbury, New Zealand

Kinmen National Park 2008 Guidebook of Kinmen National Park Kinmen National Park: China.

Ko YJ, Pastore DL 2005 A hierarchical model of service quality for the recreational sport industry

Sport Marketing Quarterly 14(2): 84–97.

Kozak M, Rimmington M 2000 Tourist satisfaction with Mallorca, Spain, as an off-season holiday

destination Journal of Travel Research 38(3):

260–269

Ladhari R, Brun I, Morales M 2008 Determinants

of dining satisfaction and post-dining

behav-ioural intentions International Journal of

Hospital-ity Management 27(4): 563–573.

Li X, Petrick JF 2008 Examining the antecedents of brand loyalty from an investment model perspec-

tive Journal of Travel Research 47(1): 25–34.

Liljander V, Strandvik T 1995 The relation between service quality, satisfaction and intentions in

managing service quality In Managing Service Quality, Kunst, P, Lemmink J (eds) Paul Chapman

Publishing: London; 45–63

Lin JSC, Hsieh PL 2007 The infl uence of ogy readiness on satisfaction and behavioural

technol-intentions toward self-service technologies

Com-puters in Human Behaviour 23(3): 1597–1615.

Lounsbury JW, Hoopes LL 1985 An investigation

of factors associated with vacation satisfaction

Journal of Leisure Research 17(1): 1–13.

Ma XL, Ryan C, Bao JG 2009 Chinese national parks: differences, resource use and tourism

product portfolios Tourism Management 30(1):

21–30Mak HN, Wong KF, Chang CY 2010 Factors affecting the service quality of the tour guiding

profession in Macau International Journal of

Tourism Research 12(3): 205–218.

Matzler K, Füller J, Renzl B, Herting S, Späth S

2008 Customer satisfaction with Alpine ski areas: the moderating effects of personal, situational,

and product factors Journal of Travel Research

46(4): 403–413

McIntyre N 1989 The personal meaning of

partici-pation: enduring involvement Journal of Leisure

Research 21(2): 357–359.

Murphy PE, Pritchard M 1997 Destination

price-value perceptions: an examination of origin and

seasonal infl uences Journal of Travel Research

35(3): 16–22

Namkung Y, Jang SJ 2007 Does food quality really

matter in restaurants? Its impact on customer

sat-isfaction and behavioural intentions Journal of

Hospitality & Tourism Research 31(3): 387–410.

Nowacki MM 2009 Quality of visitor attractions,

satisfaction, benefi ts and behavioural intentions

of visitors: verifi cation of a model International

Journal of Tourism Research 11(3): 297–309.

Okello MM, Yerian S 2009 Tourist satisfaction in

relation to attractions and implications for

con-servation in the protected areas of the Northern

Circuit, Tanzania Journal of Sustainable Tourism

17(5): 605–625

Oliver RL 1997 Satisfaction: A Behavioural Perceptive

on the Consumer McGraw-Hill: Singapore.

Pizam A, Ellis T 1999 Customer satisfaction and its

measurement in hospitality enterprises

Interna-tional Journal of Contemporary Hospitality

Manage-ment 11(7): 1–18.

Pollack BL 2009 Linking the hierarchical service

quality model to customer satisfaction and

loyalty Journal of Services Marketing 23(1): 42–50.

Qu HL, Li I 1997 The characteristics and

satisfac-tion of mainland Chinese visitors to Hong Kong

Journal of Travel Research 35(4): 37–41.

Ritchie J, Crouch G 2003 The Competitive

Destina-tion: A Sustainable Tourism Perspective CABI Pub:

New York

Ross GF 1993 Destination evaluation and vacation

preferences Annals of Tourism Research 20(3):

477–489

Rumelt R, Schendel D, Teece DJ 1991 Strategic

management and economics Strategic

Manage-ment Journal 12: 5–30.

Ryan C 1999 From the psychometrics of SERVQUAL

to sex: Measurements of tourism satisfaction In

Consumer Behavior in Travel and Tourism, Pizam A,

Mansfi eld Y (eds) The Haworth Hospitality

Press: New York; 267–286

Ryan C, Gu H, Meng F 2008 Destination planning

in China In Tourism in China: Destinations, Culture

and Communities, Ryan C, Gu H (eds) Routledge:

New York; 11–37

Shonk DJ 2006 Perceptions of service quality, tion and the intent to return among tourists attending

satisfac-a sporting event Unpublished doctorsatisfac-al dissertsatisfac-a-

disserta-tion, Ohio State University: Columbus

Solomon MR 2002 Consumer Behavior

Prentice-Hall: Singapore

Spreng R, Mackenzie S, Olshavsky R 1996 A examination of the determinants of consumer

re-satisfaction Journal of Marketing 60(3): 15–32.

Stevens BF 1992 Price value perceptions of

travel-ers Journal of Travel Research 31(2): 44–48.

Stevens P, Knutson B, Patton M 1995 Dineserv: a tool for measuring service quality in restaurants

Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration

manage-tomers? Journal of Travel Research 27(2): 16–21.

White C, Yu YT 2005 Satisfaction emotions and

consumer behavioural intentions Journal of

Ser-vices Marketing 19(6/7): 411–420.

Wilkins H, Merrilees B, Herington C 2006 Towards

an understanding of total service quality in hotels

International Journal of Hospitality Management

develop-Tourism Management 29(5): 841–856.

This paper developed and tested an

integrative model to examine the

relationship between tourism decisions and

their cultural background The model was

tested using surveyed data from 400 tourists

travelling to Lisbon, a cultural city and the

capital of Portugal The results of a

structural equation analysis revealed that

culture affect tourist decisions The decision

to visit Lisbon relies on its quality, brand

and price This decision is shaped by the

likelihood of visitors to accept social

differentiation (power distance), moderated

by their sense of individualism as well as

their long-term orientation Implications

and suggestions for future research are

discussed Copyright © 2010 John Wiley &

Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: cultural orientations;

decision-making styles; Portugal; tourist behaviour

Received 18 January 2010; Revised 27 September 2010;

Accepted 7 October 2010

INTRODUCTION

International tourism is responsible for the

movements of people around the world

that grew, in less than 50 years, from 25

million up to 927 million in 2008 (World Tourism Organization, 2009) Given the expo-nential growth of international travel, an inter-est in cultural infl uences on travel behaviour starts to enhance the body of knowledge in this

fi eld The existing research about culture focuses on social impacts (Bammel and Bur-rus-Bammel, 1996), the infl uence of culture on tourism behaviour (March, 1997) and the scope

of the concept by itself (Morrison, 2002) Although it is arguable that culture is of para-mount importance for the understanding of consumer behaviour (Reisinger and Turner, 2003), the tourism decision-making (DM) has been explained mainly on psychological fea-tures of tourists rather than on their cultural background (Woodside and McDonald, 1994) According to Sirakaya and Woodside (2005), the understanding of the complexity and inter-relationship of these variables in tourist DM is still a topic that deserves further research.Research in tourism DM relies on positivism and explains what decisions tourists make (Pizam and Mansfeld, 1999) This view enhances greatly the body of knowledge about tourism DM processes, although it fails to provide a description of how and why tourists reach a particular decision (Abelson and Levi, 1985; Pizam and Mansfeld, 1999) Neverthe-less, there is consensus that culture shapes

tourism DM (e.g Turner et al., 2001; Decrop

and Snelders, 2005; Sirakaya and Woodside,

2005, among others), and studies discussing the causal relationships among cultural traits and DM are still lacking Therefore, the paper has a twofold purpose: (i) to underpin a con-ceptual model to understand how cultural traits shape tourism DM; and (ii) to study and

Int J Tourism Res 13, 433–446 (2011)

Published online 18 November 2010 in Wiley Online Library

(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/jtr.817

Impact of Culture on Tourist

Decision-making Styles

Antónia Correia1,*, Metin Kozak2 and João Ferradeira1

1 CASEE and Faculty of Economics, University of Algarve, Faro, Portugal

2 School of Tourism and Hospitality Management, Mugla University, Mugla, Turkey

*Correspondence to: Antónia Correia, CASEE and Faculty

of Economics, University of Algarve, Campus de

Gambe-las, Edifi cio 9, 8005-139 Faro, Portugal.

E-mail: acorreia@ualg.pt

test a structural equation model in a cultural

city where scientifi c research is virtually

non-existent

Thus, the study contributes to the literature

by providing and testing the relationship

between cultural traits and DM, as well as at

the methodological level, it tries to prove the

possible way of making use of the quantitative

data analysis to explain the ‘why’ of such

decisions

LITERATURE REVIEW

The concept of national culture or cultural traits

is possibly one of the most researched areas in

the fi eld of tourism research (e.g Reisinger,

2009; Reisinger et al., 2009, and references

therein) However, the vast majority of these

studies have been conducted over the past

decade and focused on a comprehensive

understanding of the infl uence of national

culture on particular subjects related to tourist

behaviour such as information search (e.g

Money and Crotts, 2003; Litvin et al., 2004),

satisfaction and complaining behaviour (e.g

Crotts and Erdmann, 2000; Tsang and Ap,

2007), and perceptions (e.g Reisinger and

Mavondo, 2006) Albeit with limited empirical

evidence, the DM process of tourists is shaped

by cultural traits Thus, the style of DM can

often be better understood if one assumes that

there exist differences across members with

different cultural traits Constructs such as

cul-tural traits and DM appear in the literature as

two fi elds of research apparently not

corre-lated The main streams and concepts in these

fi elds are discussed below

DMS

DM process has been understood as the way

to defi ne consumers and their behaviours

(Arroba, 1977) The topic was introduced based

on positivism by Mason (1981), who reduces

the DM to a rational process where visitors are

perceived as ‘homo economics’ Therefore,

considering visitors’ behaviour as purposive,

the tourist consumption gains some utilitarian

value, which consequently implies an

inten-tion (Correia, 2002) Despite the value of the

previous research, it presents a limited view to

explain how and why people decide in a certain

way (Bettman, 1979) Accordingly, instead of going through a set of rational steps to take a decision, consumers utilize simple strategies with emphasis on particular characteristics or dimensions of products to be selected (Bettman

et al., 1998) Petrick et al (2007) suggest that a

decision of choosing a particular destination includes distinct stages that can change accord-ing to the specifi city of the tourist product aimed by consumers Based on this, an approach of consumers’ characteristics with a focus on their mental characteristics has been developed under the assumption that consum-ers have cognitive and affective orientations

that infl uence DM styles (DMS) (Lysonski et al.,

(Opperdijk van Veen, 1983; Bargeman et al.,

2002), socio-demographic and logical (Bronner and de Hoog, 1982), and

socio-psycho-culture (Lysonski et al., 1996).

Given the inherent particularity of tourism product, tourist DM is more peculiar and complex than other DM processes In fact, tourist decisions tend to be characterized as an extended DM, which presupposes a high-involvement learning process This relies on the evaluation of a number of information sources that may lead to some confusion by over-choice (CC) Further, the tourists are only able to evaluate the quality of the attributes of the destination; thus, their decisions tends to rely on the brand image, price and tangible elements; the intangibility leads to a higher perceived risk to the product, which consum-ers tend to minimize by having loyal behav-iours (Bonera, 2008) This peculiarity leads to consider that decisions are mainly based on quality, price, brand, CC and brand loyalty Decision styles were previously inventoried

in the Sproles and Kendall (1986) research Table 1 sum up Sproles and Kendall’s (1986) DMS typologies and highlights some of the tourism studies wherein these typologies are presented

Table 1 Decision-making styles

Rational vacationers — who are the individuals that choose the ‘good enough alternative’ (Decrop and Snelders, 2005)

2 Brand-consciousness

(BC)

Consumers who are akin

to buy the more expensive, well-known brands

Choosing well-known brands allows avoiding risks (Decrop and Snelders, 2005)

3 Price and value for

money (PC)

Consumers who seek for the best alternative; they are concerned with getting the best value for money

Constrained vacationers — who are constrained by disposable income or give the priority for value for money (Decrop and Snelders, 2005), as such the low-cost tourists (Correia and Pimpão, 2008)

4 Confusion by

over-choice (CC)

Consumers who attempt

to consider all the alternatives, and due to this, they feel confused to make a decision

Rational vacationers — who make the vacation plans in detail and get involved in a highly learning process, which involved gathering all the available information

Hedonic vacationers — who always talk about the holidays, recommend to others but is barely able to decide in accordance with the advice they collected as presented (Decrop and Snelders, 2005)

5 Habitual, brand-loyal

orientation (BL)

Consumers who are likely to create habits of consumption

Psychocentric vacationers — individuals that prefer travelling to familiar and safe

destinations (Plog, 1974)

Source: Own elaboration.

DMS, decision-making style.

Cultural traits

As Linton mentioned (1945, in Lee et al., 2007,

p 333), culture is ‘the confi guration of learned

behaviour and results of behaviour whose

component elements are shared and

transmit-ted by the members of a particular society’

Thus, it is constructed upon several criteria

such as: religion, language or values, which,

among other functions, exert an infl uence over

human being choices through perceptions and

evaluations (Foscht et al., 2008) Although there

are a number of defi nitions found in the

litera-ture, culture continues to be a controversial

topic, mainly in what concerns the scope of the

construct Some authors defend the existence

of a national culture (e.g Elliott, 2001), while

others claim that culture must be perceived

through a micro or regional level (e.g Blodgett

et al., 2008) Despite the controversy, every

defi nition declares at some point that culture

is a shared behaviour or meaning among

the members of a group (Smith et al., 2002;

Johanson, 2003)

Although the utmost importance of culture

is to understand the society, human behaviour and the importance that this may signify to perform marketing strategies (Sobel, 1981), the studies developed in the fi eld are mainly con-cerned with the conceptualization and defi ni-tion of culture, as well as with understanding

of the impacts of culture among societies (Alisjahbana, 1966; Boekestijn, 1988) More-over, cross-cultural studies in the tourism fi eld have been performed in order to investigate the infl uence of culture over leisure activities

as well as the tourists’ lifestyles In this topic, results of studies show that ethnicity exerts an infl uence over lifestyle (Kew, 1979), and race shapes tourist behaviour (Neulinger, 1974) Further, it is argued that culture explains the gap between the daily behaviour and tourism behaviour (Reisinger and Turner, 2003)

Considering the previous research, the Hofstede (1980, 1991) framework can be con-sidered as one of the most relevant works

in the fi eld of cross-cultural research This

presents fi ve dimensions in order to illustrate

that ‘cultural differences between modern

nations could be meaningfully measured and

ordered along a discrete set of variables,

repre-senting different answers to universal

prob-lems of human societies’ (Hofstede, 2006,

p 883): power distance (PDI); uncertainty

avoidance (UA); individualism

(IDV)–collec-tivism; masculinity–femininity and long versus

short-term orientation

Power distance refers to tolerance to accept

the inequality that exists in a society

Uncertainty avoidance refers to the degree

to which people do not tolerate

uncer-tainty or risk situations

Individualism refers to the degree in which

the individual focuses on his/her

well-being; the opposite site of the index is

collectivism

Masculinity refers to the sense of

achieve-ment, competition and materialism

(indi-viduals are only concerned with their

careers and money), and the other extreme

of the scale is femininity (relationship)

Long-term orientation refers to persistence,

thrift and attitudes oriented to the future;

the other extreme represents a short-term

orientation that refers to stability,

tradi-tion and reciprocatradi-tion of greetings and

favours (hereafter: LTO)

Despite the recognized importance of culture

in tourism (Pizam and Jeong, 1996; March,

1997; Kozak, 2002, among others), little has

been done to comprehend how cultural traits

infl uence the vacation DM process and

ulti-mately are responsible to induce criteria to

lead tourists to select a particular destination

instead of another Moreover, Reisinger and

Turner (2003, p 10) state that ‘tourist culture

explains tourist behaviour’ Taking this as a

reference point, the conceptual model is

presented

Conceptual model and hypothesis

This section presents the conceptual model

used to explain that DMS of tourists are willing

to be expressed by cultural traits In what cerns culture, Hofstede’s (1980, 1991) cultural traits were adopted since this was considered

con-as one of the most comprehensive framework

(Foscht et al., 2008) A similar situation appears

in the fi eld of DMS where Sproles and Kendall’s (1986) inventory is perhaps one of the most comprehensive taxonomy of DMS

(Walsh et al., 2001) Thus, given the peculiarity

of the tourist decision, the presented model grounds on Hofstede’s (1980, 1991) cultural framework and on an adjusted version of Sproles and Kendall’s (1986) decision style inventory Furthermore, the model was built

up in accordance to the relevant literature on tourist decision typologies since it comprises

fi ve of the eight primary dimensions lighted by Sproles and Kendall (1986) Regard-ing the issues of culture, the model considered

high-fi ve cultural traits of Hofstede’s framework (1980, 1991) that, in a certain way, are willing

to infl uence and explain the behaviours and decisions of individuals The model departs from the assumption that cultural traits have a direct effect on DMS, which is set based on the

literature review (Hypothesis 1) This

hypoth-esis was set to test the infl uence of cultural traits on DMS

The hypothesis to be tested is stated as:

Hypothesis 1: Cultural traits infl uence positively DMS

As Crotts and Erdmann (2000, p 411) state

‘cultural differences have often been purported

as the basis for specifi c stereotypes given

to tourists from specifi c national origins’ In this sense, tourists with a specifi c cultural background such as a French tourist tend to behave differently from tourists raised accord-ing to English culture As mentioned by Boisse-vian and Inglott (1979), a French tourist can be considered extremely demanding, while a tourist with an English background is reported

in Pi-Sunyer’s (1977) research as socially scious and honest Therefore, it supports that the existent cultural differences among coun-tries are willing to infl uence the tourist behav-ioural patterns, not only regarding the buying behaviours once at destination but also on the decisions that lead them to choose the appro-priate destination to spend their holidays

con-Therefore, little doubt exists to consider culture

as one of the leading infl uencing factors of

con-sumer DM (Pizam and Sussmann, 1995; You et

al., 2000).

Methodology

To achieve scientifi c rigour, the research needs

to be delimited by a thorough method

There-fore, the exploratory research design is the one

that best fi ts the study since little is

acknowl-edged about the relationship between the

dimensions that characterize cultural and DMS

scales Also, the particularity of Lisbon as a

cultural city and the lack of previous research

that relates these two different frameworks are

the main reasons to be considered in setting the

type of investigation As mentioned by Sekaran

(2003, p 119), the exploratory investigation is

‘undertaken when not much is known about

the situation at hand, or no information is

available’

The survey instrument was structured into

three different parts Part 1 covered

socio-demographic variables such as: gender, age,

marital status, education, employment, travel

experience and familiarity Part 2 encompasses

18 items of cultural traits derived from the

Hofstede scale (1980, 1991) Part 3 contained 26

items that represented a modifi ed version of the

Sproles and Kendall DMS dimensions (1986)

adapted to tourism behaviour The questions

were not grouped and presented in the

ques-tionnaire by dimensions to ensure minimal

bias during the answering process Moreover,

the measurement of the primordial dimensions

utilized a fi ve-point Likert scale varying from

1 (not important/strongly disagree) to 5 (very

important/strongly agree), which allows ‘to

examine how strong subjects agree or disagree

with the statements’ (Sekaran, 2003, p 197)

The questionnaires were individually checked

and numbered, and the statistical analysis

was performed supported by the software

package SPSS (PSE, Portugal) 14.0 to ensure the

validity of the data The software AMOS

(PSE, Portugal) 6 was the main tool to estimate

the theoretical model developed to explain

the relationship between cultural dimensions

and DMS

The empirical study was undertaken at the

Lisbon Airport, Portugal Lisbon is the capital

of Portugal as well as one of the main tourist destinations, visited by more than 4 million tourists from which a random sample of visi-tors were selected The sample was stratifi ed according to the number of tourists in 2008.Out of 400 questionnaires distributed, 323 fulfi lled questionnaires were collected, which represents a response rate of 81.0% This cor-responds to a sampling error of 5.45% with a confi dence interval of 95% — an acceptable standard according to Dillman (1978) The sample error allows to ensure the generaliz-ability of the data, meaning that the fi ndings are applicable to a more general population Also, the sample size is in close accordance

with Hair et al (1998) due to the fact that the

ratios of observation are always higher than the observations recommended Also, the data validity and reliability can be guaranteed since: (i) the point of departure was a questionnaire comprising the dimensions already applied in the literature about cultural traits and DMS (Hofstede, 1980, 1991; Sproles and Kendall, 1986), which were adapted for the present purpose, ensuring that prior research was con-sidered and face validity was established (Hof-stede, 1980, 1991; Sproles and Kendall, 1986; Sproles and Sproles, 1990); (ii) all relevant lit-erature was taken into consideration; and (iii) the questionnaire was pre-tested with a sub-sample of 50 passengers from which minor amends were done on the questionnaire

RESULTS

Phases of analysis

The data analysis develops in two phases of analysis The fi rst phase consisted of an explor-atory factor analysis (EFA) followed by a con-

fi rmatory factor analysis (CFA) This allows for the identifi cation of latent variables con-cerning cultural traits and DMS At the second phase, a structural model was estimated to evaluate the impact of cultural traits on DMS EFA was used as a preliminary technique to

fi nd the underlying dimensions or constructs

in the data The extraction method employed was maximum likelihood estimation, with a VARIMAX rotation method The analysis considered a latent root criterion of 1.0 for factor inclusion A subsequent CFA allowed

for evaluation of the resulting scales This

anal-ysis specifi ed the relationship between

observed variables and latent constructs, and

suggested that all the constructs can be

inter-correlated freely (Joreskog, 1993)

Measure-ment scale items, completely standardized

loadings, error variances and reliability

indica-tors were used to confi rm the goodness of fi t

for each construct

Characterization of the sample

The socio-demographic characterization of the

sample relies on Western societies, since

visi-tors are from Benelux countries, America,

Nordic countries and England Most

respon-dents are of a high social status (44.1%), with

an average monthly income over 3501 euros

Moreover, gender was roughly equally

repre-sented They are mainly middle-aged visitors

with a superior level of education, since

they have an average age of 42.6 years and an

education level equal or superior to

under-graduate level (68.6%) Also, most of the

respondents are married (60.2%) and employed

(78.8%)

In terms of trip characteristics, the sample

has an average length of 7.20 days with a

stan-dard deviation of 11.12 days, which means that

in an extreme situation, the maximum number

of holidays can reach 18 days of staying

Fur-thermore, the average days before purchase or

booking the trip is 37.3 days, with a standard

deviation of 42.04 days, which suggests that

the visitors plan their holidays mostly with an

advance of one month, and in pontual

situa-tions, it can be booked almost three months

prior to travel Also, the main purpose of

the trip is leisure or ‘holidays’ for 41.8% of

the individuals, while for the other 58.2%,

the main purpose includes other motives

besides holidays Therefore, it may suggest

that besides the holidays, individuals choose

the destination based on other factors that may

have to do with the plurality of functions of

the destination The great part of visitors is

repeaters (66.3%), while the fi rst-time visitor

represents 33.7% of the sample In addition,

the majority of repeaters have been in the

destination in the last two years (56.8%), which

may imply that the destination contains the

adequate attributes to attract and satisfy the

visitors’ patterns in order to infl uence them

to return

Exploratory and confi rmatory factor analysis

The development of the measurement scales was performed with EFA, in order to reduce the dimensionality of the data and to identify the main factors relating to cultural dimen-sions and DMS The initial 18 components utilized to defi ne cultural traits were reduced

to three new factors and together accounted for 72.3 % of the total variance (kaiser-meyer-olkin measure of sampling adequacy (KMO) = 0.8;

Bartlett test: p = 0.00) Further, taking into account the meaning of the cultural factors grouped with higher loadings and the litera-ture, the cultural factors represented are: PDI, IDV and LTO In this sense, cultural traits such

as masculinity and uncertainty avoidance were

eliminated due to its low reliability and low loading factors

The underlying constructs associated with DMS determined by EFA analysis allowed the reduction of the 26 items to a more manageable number The remaining 14 statements, having eigenvalues greater than 1 and explaining 69.5% of the total variance, were grouped into

four factors labelled as follows: quality, brand, price and confusion by over-choice (see Table 2)

Reliability coeffi cients were computed for each factor, and items with low loadings or with low reliability were eliminated, to enhance the quality of the model As such, brand loyalty dimension was discharged from further analy-sis However, it is not a surprising result since the construct in previous studies, including Sproles and Kendall (1986), has already showed

a low reliability coeffi cient Since the main purpose of this investigation was to determine the ways in which cultural traits infl uence the DMS, the following analysis imposed con-straints on the loadings as they emerged from the EFA Also included on the table is the variance extracted for each factor, mean and standard deviation

A CFA evaluates the resulting scale derived from EFA The CFA assessed and validated the measurement model of the determinants of the DMS This model fi ts the data well, as can be seen by the values of several fi t indices: good-ness-of-fi t index (GFI) = 0.903, adjusted GFI

Table 2 Exploratory factor analysis

IDV 01 — Have suffi cient time for you and for your family 4.17 0.999

IDV 02 — Have a good working condition (e.g

Q2 — When I choose a destination, I try to get the very

best or the perfect destination

B1 — The well-known tourism brands are the best for me 2.54 0.959

B2 — The more expensive tourism destinations are usually

my choice

B3 — The higher is the price of a tourism destination, the

better is the quality

B4 — I prefer buying the best tourism destination selling

brands

B5 — The most advertised tourism destination brands are

usually a very good choice

P2 — The lower price holidays are usually my choices 2.64 1.121

C1 — There are so many tourism destination brands that I

often feel confused

C2 — The more I learn about destination, the harder it

seems to choose the best

C3 — All the information I get on different tourism

destination confuses me

(AGFI) = 0.864, normed fi t index (NFI) = 0.870,

root mean square residual (RMR) = 0.057, root

mean square error approximation (RMSEA) =

0.059 and a χ2 = 360 748 (df = 169; p = 0.000), a

value that is signifi cant because of the

sensitiv-ity of this indicator to large samples The

regression parameters and the factor ances are all signifi cant at the 1% level The results of fi nal CFA yield that all the items’ standardized loadings were signifi cant at the 1% level that provides evidence of convergent validity (see Table 3)