Klaus Weiermair

Tourists’ perceptions towards and satisfaction with service quality in the cross‐cultural service encounter: implications for hospitality and tourism management

This article develops a comprehensive cultural construct to explain and forecast tourists’ behaviour and quality judgements. A destination value chain is depicted to capture the possible influence of culture and cultural values on tourism behaviour. Cultural norms have an impact on both tourists’ expectations and their perceptions of received service quality for any of the six service elements frequently employed in tourism analyses. Tourism service encounters take place in the context of a tourism culture which is formed by four components: the national/regional settings of the tourist and the host region, the tourists’ various subcultures and the organisational culture of tourism enterprises in the tourism receiving region. A differentiated approach is developed which distinguishes between global, national and sub‐national cultural constructs.

Destination Benchmarking: An Indicator-System’s Potential for Exploring Guest Satisfaction

After giving an overview of latest benchmark approaches in tourism, an already existing Benchmarking Indicator System implemented by the Austrian Government in 1987 is discussed. This article first critically assesses the neglect of relevant elements covering the production and delivery process of tourism services in this approach. Hence, the existing benchmarking approach is extended conceptually by linking it to tourists’ satisfaction measures. There is growing evidence that tourism service quality attributes can fall into three different categories of factors that display a differing impact on tourist satisfaction. The literature distinguishes between two different approaches for best identifying these factors: Vavra’s two-dimensional Importance Grid, which is based on customers’ self-stated importance and derived importance assessments, and Brandt’s Penalty-Reward-Contrast analysis, which is based on the performance-only approach and thus only uses one (e.g., the satisfaction) variable. This article tests both approaches empirically using different sets of variables from a recent destination benchmarking survey.

Measuring tourist judgment on service quality

Abstract This study measures tourist judgments on service quality in alpine ski resorts. An attribute based method was employed in order to estimate weighting schemes both for quality judgments across different tourism activity domains and different quality dimensions within winter resorts and to quantify an overall quality measure. A linear regression and Sirgys congruity model of customer satisfaction/dissatisfaction were adopted. The results indicate that there exists a linear relationship between the overall quality measure and the partial judgments of each domain/dimension. This allows deciphering the relevance of different domains of tourism activity and quality dimensions within the process of making quality judgments.

The internationalization behaviour of small‐and medium‐sized service enterprises

This paper concerns itself with the internationalization behavior of service companies in general, and tourism service companies in particular, and is based on the literature dealing with the internationalization process (Johanson and Vahlne, 1977; Johanson and Vahlne, 1990). An attempt will be made to identify the problems of small and medium‐sized service enterprises which are faced with the entry strategies into foreign service industries markets, and includes tourism enterprises, advertising, and consulting firms. Both the theoretical and empirical discussion of this paper should have a direct relevance upon the behavior of Asian outbound tourism agencies as they adjust to the new requirements associated with long haul tourism to European or other overseas destinations.

Prospects for innovation in tourism: analyzing the innovation potential throughout the tourism value chain.

SUMMARY The tourism product is a composite one with its production, distribution and marketing being configured along a value chain involving many activities which are vertically, horizontally and diagonally related and integrated in varying degrees. Both orthodox and non-orthodox economists agree that innovations will only be undertaken when there is a sufficiently high innovation dividend which pays for the added cost and risk of innovation. Thus profitability appears to be the strongest explanatory variable both behind investment and innovation. Based on the notion that expected profitability from innovation can serve as the primary independent variable determining innovation behaviour across different economic sectors and/or sub branches of tourism, the paper sets out to establish the innovation potential for each of the tourism value creating economic activities from the provision of information to prospective customers (tourists) in the sending region to post-trip (after sale) services. In addition to the usual profit-generating forces of costs and revenues, such dimensions as firm size and economics of scale, proximity to relevant science and technology (know-how for innovation) through human capital and forms of organisation (e.g., network-organisation and/or clusters) will equally be taken into consideration. This analysis will therefore help in pinpointing those areas of the tourism value chain where innovations are most likely to occur. The paper concludes with the presentation of a model aimed at empirically testing innovation behaviour across the tourism value chain.

Innovation through Cooperation in Destinations: First Results of an Empirical Study in Austria

ABSTRACT In the innovation literature different types of collaboration and cooperation have been advanced as being favourable for the innovation performance of enterprises. Nevertheless empirical studies on entrepreneurship in small and medium sized enterprises in alpine tourism show that the majority of small and medium sized tourism enterprises seem to shy away from any kind of cooperation even though the market forces them to improve their tourism products and services in the face of globalization and the maintenance of competitive advantage. This paper analyzes data on Austrias small and medium sized tourism enterprises collected in a pilot project concerned with the measurement of innovation in destinations through personal interviews. Statistical analyses reveal a positive relationship between enterprises engaged in collaboration and the level of innovation. These findings strongly support the importance of cooperation and networking for small and medium sized firms to increase the level of innovation.

Destination Development and the Tourist Life-cycle: Implications for Entrepreneurship in Alpine Tourism

The so called ‘new age of tourism’ influenced the entrepreneurial paradigm considerably. The traditional model of mass tourism changed into a ‘new tourism’ which is presumably characterized by quality seeking customers with multi-optional needs, new production factors (such as information technologies), new business models and new management processes. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relvance of the tourist life-cycle model in deriving implicatone for entrepreneurship within tourism destinations. The literature review reveals a research gap in the field of entrepreneurial strategy options and the execution of operational strategies in tourism destinations. Thus, the paper starts with a short overview of the driving forces of business growth in Alpine tourism. Further, it is argued that the development of Alpine tourism has created a special environment for entrepreneurs in tourism destinations. The second part of the paper, therefore, provides a literature review of tourist life-cycle research. In the next step, the authors attempt to describe specific challenges and qualifications needed for tourism entrepreneurs along the various phases of the destinatoin life-cycle. The paper concludes with recommendations for entrepreneurship development, while making a conribution to research on tourism destinations.

Tourism Sustainability through Destination Benchmarking Indicator Systems : The Case of Alpine Tourism

This paper begins by describing typical resource and sustainability issues provoked by the small and medium-sized tourism enterprise structure in European mountain areas. It suggests that because of the labour intensive character of tourism, sustained competitive gains for alpine businesses and their communities can be obtained by focusing management energies on improving the productivity of local tourism service production processes or value chains. Thus, the management of tourism services produced along a destination value chain may be seen from two viewpoints:. The paper suggests that core destination management activities should involve the regular benchmarking of visitor satisfaction as well as of effective resource stewardship. In turn, management in sustainable destinations should focus on its efforts on improving the quality perceived by the customer, whilst making the corresponding conversion of inputs into outputs more efficiently. The paper proposes an indicator system, a tool for benchmarking alpine tourism destination efficiency in both quantitative and qualitative ways. Using an European Alps case study, it demonstrates the applicability of the Data Envelopment Analysis as a method for combining several key destination productivity factors into one comprehensive productivity index.

The changing travel behaviour of Austria’s ageing population and its impact on tourism

Purpose – As the population of the western world is aging, the importance of seniors for the tourism economy is growing. Seniors are expected to be an important future market. Thus overall leisure behaviour in general, and travel and tourism behaviour in particular, are analysed for the example of the Austrian market.Design methodology/approach – A focus group was conducted with participants aged 55+, where their leisure and travel habits as well as preferences were investigated.Findings – The results showed that leisure and travelling played a major role in the participants’ lives. Additionally, the participants did not change their travel behaviour considerably when entering retirement status. While they changed their preferences to longer stays and to travelling off‐season, their preferences considering holiday destinations, mode of transport or distance of travel did not change significantly. The assumption that travel behaviour and travel preferences are acquired over a longer time span during the li...

The Importance of Cultural Distance in the Perception of Evaluation of Service Quality

ABSTRACT The paper deals with determinants in the cross-cultural setting of service encounters in tourism. The first part of the paper describes the theoretically expected influence of culture (cultural values) on the perception of expected and received service qualities. Based on a review of the literature cultural values are hypothesized to intervene in the formation of expectations and the perception of received service quality (satisfaction) across specific service quality related choice and/or decision and evaluation processes. Cases in point are particular dimensions of service quality encountered in tourism destinations, events and accommodation settings. The second part of the paper explores the usefulness and also the limitations of alternate cultural constructs found in the literature and used in the analysis of tourists service quality judgements. Finally in part three the cultural distance is suggested as a useful potential proxy for the influence of cultural values in tourism applications and is discussed alongside other cultural constructs traditionally employed in tourism analyses.