Measuring the Quality of Ecotourism Services

Abstract

Ecotourism forms the pillar of the country's tourism industry. Ecotourists make up more than 10% of international tourists in Malaysia. When service quality is thought of as an important factor to the success of tourism service providers, the importance of estimating service quality provided to tourists becomes apparent. Estimating service quality provides tourism service providers with the necessary information needed to manage their marketing operations appropriately. Therefore, this estimation should be performed with the right measurement scales. Despite the high volume of research on service quality (SERVQUAL) models in recent years, limited effort has been directed toward improving the tool for measuring service quality, particularly to apply to the ecotourism sector in developing countries. This article aims to improve a SERVQUAL model that is suitable for ecotourism areas in developing countries using five dimensions of the original model and one additional sustainability dimension. Based on a survey of 127 tourists in Tasik Kenyir, an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted to discover the underlying dimension of ecotourism services and test for reliability and validity. Using EFA resulted in seven factors totaling 27 items. These factors are labeled as follows: tangible sustainability, sustainable practices, tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. The results reveal that when SERVQUAL is applied within the ecotourism context, new dimensions of tangible sustainability and sustainable practices may emerge. The result implies the need to refine the SERVQUAL model when used in different contexts.

Cruise Travelers’ Service Perceptions: A Critical Content Analysis

“…Although cruise tourism is among the tourism phenomena that are experiencing significant growth [1], it has not received much attention from an academic point of view [13,14], especially in terms of cruisers' service quality perceptions. This is worrying, since service quality studies can assess how successful service ambassadors fulfill tourists' needs according to tourists' perceptions, helping cruise ship staff to prioritize tourists' needs, wants, and expectations [15].…”

Profiling of Egyptian Eco-lodge Guests

“…They are as follows: personnel response, complementary offer, tourist relations, tangible elements, and empathy. Yusof et al, (2014) developed that a scale comprising seven dimensions to measure the service quality expectations and perception of Eco-tourists in lodging on ecotourism destination. They are as follows: sustainability, sustainable practices, tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy.…”

Service Quality and Guest Satisfaction in Egyptian Eco-lodge

“…This research found that the height was ecotangibles. Yusof et al, (2014) study showed that a scale comprising seven dimensions to measure the service quality expectations and perception of Eco-tourists in lodging on ecotourism destination. They are as follows: sustainability (visual attraction and the appeal of natural attractions), sustainable practices (development integrated with local environment/ culture), tangibility, (physical facilities and natural resources), reliability (the staff provides on-time services), responsiveness (the staff is willing to assist tourists), assurance (the staff has the knowledge that is necessary to answer questions) and empathy (the staff understands the specific needs of tourists).…”

“…In this study, the researcher conducted the hotel and Eco lodge model from the previous research of service quality to develop ECO-SERQUAL model to measure the perceived quality of ecoguest in Egyptian ECO-lodge context. The process of developing the scale goes through four stages: The first stage explores the service quality model in general industry, hotel industry, and eco-lodge context and the researcher found that there are two original scales applied in general industry SERVQUAL (Parasuraman, et al, 1985(Parasuraman, et al, , 1988 and SERVPERF (Cronin andTaylor 1992, 1994 ), In addition, there are ten developed model used to evaluated service quality in traditional hotel and eco lodge depend on the original scale that are fellow: ECOPERF (Ban and Ramsaran, 2016), HOTPERF (Tefera and Govender, 2014) ECOSERV (Yusof et al, 2014), MECOSER (Said et al, 2013), ECOCOM (Bastic and Gojcic, 2012), RE (Saez et al, 2007), ECOSER (Khan, 2003), LOI (Getty and Gettz, 2003), HOLSERV (Wong et al, 1999), LODSERV (Stevens et al, 1990). The second stage comprising between the general scale, hotel and eco-lodge model in order to identify names of different dimensions of the scale developed for hotel industry in general and ecolodge in particular and determined number of frequencies dimensions are repeated in each scale separately for inference dimensions names of proposed scale in this study.…”