Service Quality Management of Domestic Tour Operators in Thailand

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to improve the overall service quality provided by domestic tour operators in Thailand. The structure of the analysis is divided into two main sections; the tour operator’s analysis and the tourist’s analysis. The tour operator’s analysis adopted a mixed method approach with a participant-selection design combining a questionnaire survey with interview questions. There were 22 returned questionnaires, and 7 tour operators participated in an in-depth interview. The results proposed the framework of quality management which is divided into two perspectives: the company strategy’s perspective and the service process’s perspective. On the other hand, the analysis of tourists is based the author’s intense systematic review of relevant literature in developing a theoretical model. The 371 completed questionnaires were used to explore which demographic characteristics have influences on service performance and the results presented three factors: the size of the organisation; sector of organisations; and having know tour operator before trip. The subsequent analysis of tourists was in developing a structural equation model and identifying interrelationships between service quality, experience quality, customer satisfaction and behavioural intention. The result indicates that experience quality has a stronger influence on customer satisfaction and customers’ future behavioural intentions than service quality. The thesis demonstrates the two significant theoretical contributions that (1) service quality has becomed the basic requirement of doing busisness meanwhile experience quality has gained more power as its effect on customer retention and (2) social media is a potential technique to enhance tour operator performance customer satisfaction and retention. In addition, the suggestions to the managerial implications of the tour operator are focusing on the experience quality when competing with the rivals accordingly with conformance the business standard of quality.