Friday 30 November 2007

Geva 1989

Changes in the perception of a service during its consumption: A case of organised tours

Quite interesting and remarkably straight forward. 15 item scale - pre tour, post tour
Look at comparative rankings. What changes? why?
Scale put together using lit review, industry informants, and consumers.
The key difference was the terrible ranking of the tour operator post-tour compared to pre-tour.
Why was this? Not really diagnostic - this model.

Gilbert 2006

A cross-industry comparison of customer satisfaction

Good lit review - but ultimatley concerned with big cross-industry comparisons
Does mention a big "Customer Satisfaction Survey" from Gilbert in another article. - with Satpers and Satsett

Discusses confirmation-disconfirmaton, performance only, overall satisfaction.

Akama 2002

Measuring tourist satisfaction with Kenya's wildlife safari: a case study of Tsavo West National Park

Uses adapted SERVQUAL - 29 items. Trying to understand why fewer people are visiting Kenyan NPs.
The results shoe that people are satisfaied, but point to other possible reasons.

Thursday 29 November 2007

Kozak 2001

Repeaters'behavior at two distinct destinations

Useful article in that the methodology is similar to that which I will probably employ.
The author considers destination loyalty considering four main factors:
1) Level of tourist satisfaction
2) Previous visits to the same destination
3) Previous visits to the same country
4) Other factors

And considers amongst other hypotheses, how tourist satisfaction is associated with behavioural intentions to return to the same destination and to visit other similar destinations in the same country.

Although there is a strong focus on destination loyalty, the methods used can be of value. A questionnaire was used and was informed by both primary and secondary sources – personal experience, informal discussions, open-ended survey questions, TV shows, holiday brochures.

The main questionnaire itself was in three sections:
1) Questions regarding visits to the tourist destination in question – bio- section.
2) 45-item scale measuring attributes using a D-T scale (delighted-terrible scale)
3) 3-items asking about future intentions to revisit.

The questionnaire was designed alongside the guidelines of the performance-only approach.

A first draft of the questionnaire was piloted with 220 British tourists, before the main questionnaire was administered in Dalaman Airport, Turkey and Palma Airport, Mallorca. Around 500 responses were gained from each destination. The sample size of 500 was targeted to facilitate good factor analysis.

The data analysis was split into four parts:
1) Chi-square was applied to explore if any difference existed between the number of previous visits to Mallorca and Turkey.
2) A series of independent t-statistical tests was used to determine whether significant differences existed between the scores assigned to the intention to return by the first-time and repeat tourists.
3) Factor analysis was performed to identify which attributes could be reduced to a smaller set of factors.
4) Stepwise multiple regression analysis was used to demonstrate the degree of influence of certain variables over the likelihood of respondents to return.

Although may of the findings of the study are specific to destination loyalty, both destinations showed that overall satisfaction had a strong influence of behavioural intention to revisit the same and neighbouring resorts.

Weaver 2007

Destination Evaluation: The Role of Previous Travel Experience and Trip Characteristics

not particularly relevant - looks more at destination loyalty than brand loyalty.
does touch on PVP - price value perception model - possibly more suitable than EDP model
thinking at this point that the initial research will focus on capturing the motivation behind going on the trip, while post trip interviews working on the evaluation of the trip using a model - possibly PVP
pg 335 mentions a couple of authors looking at word-of-mouth and loyalty - need to follow up.

Need to get Chang and Wildt 1994 to view Price-Value Perceptions model

Kozak 2002

A Systematic Approach to Non-Repeat and Repeat Travel: With Measurement and Destination Loyalty Concept Implications

Presents a Schema - a way of showing all the different types of NR (non-repeat) and RT (repeat tourist). pg 26 shows all the different types. Good, because these are the sorts of questions people will ask - what happens if personal circumstances change
what happens if I was onoly ever going to go there once?
Introduces terms like:
ITO - one time only
CIO - Checking it out
The idea is good I think , and the third section on loyalty may want to include enough to be able to classify the visitors.

Keaveney 1995

Customer Switching Behavior in Service Industries: An Exploratory Study

Links in very nicely to several other articles, notably Bloemer and Petrick's use of Zeithaml's scale for measuring customer loyalty.
Looks at Critical Incident technique (CIT) - whereby one event (or combination or events) leads to a switch to a rival service provider.
This seems to explain switching behaviour better than an overall dissatisfaction.
The author considers a number of different industries and looks at the key incidents that affect them most.
Good article to make reference to whan considering switching behaviour.

Beeho 1997

Conceptualizing the experiences of heritage tourists A case study of New Lanark World Heritage Village

although oft-quoted, I am really unsure of the value of this article. Uses SWOT analysis and a heirarchical model to look at how consumers value New Lanark as a tourist attraction. Need to maybe come back to when I see reference made to it.
The heirarchy is split down into,
1) Activities
2)Settings
3) Experiences
4) Benefits

Tuesday 27 November 2007

Duke 1996

Consumer-Defined Dimensions for the Escorted Tour Industry Segment: Expectations, Satisfactions

very useful article from a methods point-of-view as it discusses ways to devlop a scale of items to measure tourism satisfaction with particular segments of the market.
Discusses using traditional scales as well as tourist-driven scales.
Goes into huge detail in looking at factor analysis and how oblique and orthogonal may vary.

Murray 2002

The Relationships among Service Quality, Value, Satisfaction, and Future Intentions of Customers at an Australian Sports and Leisure Centre

Another comparison of different measures (CS, SQ, PV, intentions)
- uses path analysis - SEM to test for relationships between models.
AMOS4
RNI
DELTA2
RMSEA
GFI
depicted diagramatically in the text.

Churchill JR 1979

A Paradigm for Developing Better Measures of Marketing Constructs

Slams marketing lit, for nonsensical use of quants and then propses more robust measures. Good examples in customer satisfaction - excellent for use in lit review. Reliability and validity in qaunts - what are we looking for?

Petrick 2001

An Examination of the Determinants of Entertainment Vacationers' Intentions to Revisit

Not entirely sure how relevant this is.
Compares past experience / satisfaction / perceived value in looking at Entertainment resorts future purchasing intentions.
Need to try to understand the methods:
Path analysis
SAS CALIS
maximum likelihood model.
They basically look to which of the models (satis, SQ, VALUE) best explain different types of future behaviour.
For my research, I think I need to just pick one (SERVPERF, PERVAL) and stick with it.
The aim of my research is not to compare several different approaches.
For CS, and PV - they use a unidimensional scale here.

Monday 26 November 2007

Meeting with XF 20/11

brief meeting to discuss where we are at.
I talked XF through some of the scales I had looked at and how they had developed.
SERVQUAL, SERVPERF, PERVAL, etc.

XF said to look at some more environmental scales, as questions may be asked why I am not considerig more of them.

I feel fairly confident that I am on the right track, the most positive thing I have so far, I believe, is Yuksel's methodology, shared by Bloemer, Petrick, whereby factor analysis brings out the dimensions, and then regression analysis with 'repeat/recommend' variables tells which of the dimensions lead more to future intentions.

XF consciously led me more towards methods - where am I at with Factor analysis? regression analysis?

Friday 16 November 2007

Zeithaml 1996

The Behavioral Consequences of Service Quality

Interesting in that it goes beyond SERVQUAL, SERPERF arguments - really drives at profits and the business case.
A little beyond whaere I am at.
In the sense that I am, to some extent, assuming the business case for what I am looking at.
Retention is good.

Petrick 2005

Academic papers Reoperationalising the loyalty framework

Good paper - looks more at segmentation/ demographics than perceived value/satisfaction - but the third Hypothesis H3, does concern satisfaction and intention to repeat purchase.
Key point to come form the article - or question - does loyalty lead to satisfaction or vice-versa???

One use of customer loyalty data is to identify distinct segments of visitors related to their loyalty to the service. pg 200
"To be truly loyal, they must hold a favourable attitude to the product, and purchase it repeatedly."

Loyalty assessed using a Consumer loyalty matrix - detailed pg 201
Interesting idea to avoid the asking of consumers " who else do you travle with?" - look at intensity of trips taken with a gievn TO. Low intensity, high intensity etc.

Woodruff 1997

Customer Value: The Next Source for Competitive Advantage

Key text in terms of defining customer value - looks at a number of definitions and then looks to find common ground, before presenting a heirarchical model of customer value. The idea being to operationalise the model for managers to use.
Really need to dig into for 'customer value' pinning down.
Not sure on the heirarchical model...

Bloemer 1999

Linking perceived service quality and service loyalty: a multi-dimensional perspective

Really key article, as we are starting to see a split between the service quality/ percived value scales, and the loyalty scales.
The author uses one scale (SERVQUAL) to look at service quality, and then another to look at loyalty and then looks for the links.
Why not take this template and look for something beyond SERVQUAL on the service quality/perceived value side?
13-item scale
pg 1086
great diagrams pg 1097 showing exactly the links I am looking for

de Ruyter 1998

On the relationship between perceived service quality, service loyalty and switching costs

Similar to Bloemer 1999 - looks at loyalty (3 dimensions) and compares with service quality (1 item) differs from Bloemer 1999, who uses SERVQUAL 22- item scale.
Good lit review - service loyalty
and then service quality into serice loyalty
For reasons of data collection efficiency, a unidimensional measure of perceived service quality relating to an evaluation of the core service was used ( instead of 22-item SERVQUAL)
Loyalty SCALE pg 442 - 13 items - Preference/ price indifference / dissatisfaction response
strong leaning towards dissatisfaction - need a closer look.
Used across a range of industries - is it generalisable?
In terms of the dissatisfaction - is this at just one incident, rather than overall dissatisfaction? may require incident based measure (critical incident technique).

Petrick 2002

Development of a multi-dimensional scale for measuring the perceived value of a service

new scale - SERV- PERVAL A mixture of SERVQUAL and SERPERF. Takes a large number of items (52) and reduces it to 25 throught he thoughts of a number of experts. The scale itself doesn't look like much, but seems to hold up. Key that it is applied to a service/tourism experience - A cruise.
"six times less expensive to plan marketing strategies for retaining consumers, than it is to attract new consumers" pg 119
Delves into the definitions of value.
The authors are looking for a way to measure perceived value of a service (rather than a product)
Model outlined pg 124 - five dimensions of perceived value
1. behavioural
2. Monetary Price
3. Emotional response
4. Quality
5. Reputation
Applied to cruise industry - 2 7-day cruises.
Large list of literature where the scale comes from pg 125 - FOLLOW UP ON
pg 128 scale itself with 25 items.....check it out.

Tuesday 13 November 2007

Notes on big picture

I am looking at how consumers view their trip and how this leads to repeat purchase, or recommendation.

RT is part of how they 'value' their trip.

The question is how do I build RT into this 'value'?

The resson this is so difficult is because there is no real consensus in measuring the 'value' of the trip befor even considering RT.

We need to look at how consumers value their trip and then integrate RT.

SERVQUAL - expectancy-disconfirmation - percived value-??? what else?

13th November Plan

Started putting together a document trying to sort through the differences between Service quality, customer satisfaction, perceived value, recommendation, WOM, repeat purchase, and loyalty.

Big initial focus on Oh 1999, and some of the softer articles, like Butcher, splitting the perceived value into affective and cognitive, like many authors.

Tuesday - follow up article leads - need to keep beefing up the document.
makes sense to use the Oh 1999 model as a base and develop from there.

Sunday 11 November 2007

Cater 2004

Playing with Risk? Participant Perceptions of Risk and Management Implications in Adventure Tourism


very much focused on hard adventure and risk. not particularly interesting

Buckley 2006

Adventure tourism products: Price, duration, size, skill, remoteness

Really a basic overview of the adventure tour - number of people, cost etc. Not particularly useful. maybe useful for definition references.

Davies 2006

Exploring price and non-price decision making in the UK package tour industry: Insights from small-scale travel agents and tour operators

not quite the article the title led me to believe - really delves into the market structure in serious detail. Not particularly relevant.

Sanchez 2004

Perceived value of the purchase of a tourism product

Interesting 'holistic' view with a focus on the pre- as well as the post purchase- p396 shows all the 'emotional' 'affective' side of the research.
Need to follow up on the leads from this article if I wish to follow up or understand the emotional angle.
This article too goes sthrough the history and development of perceived value.
Very detailed model employed - many different items looking at
Functional
Emotional
Social
Travel Agency
Tour package

Butcher 2001

Evaluative and relational influences on service loyalty

One step beyond OH 1999 in that it brings the affective as well as cognitive aspects of value to the table.
affective bringing in more of the emotions, while affective looks more at the rational way of looking at things.
In this sense the link with the TL becomes stronger - or needs to be looked at more.
terms like social comfort, friendship, and social regard.
i think this is a little bit far from where I want to be at, but could be useful to cover for aspects that I may not include in the model.

Oh 1999

Service quality, customer satisfaction, and customer value: A holistic perspective

Great article - need to read around it - but sounds exactly what I am looking for. Applied to lodgings but integrated model IS what I am looking for. Looks at an discusses all the relevant concepts, and then builds an integrated / holistic model.
First of all looks at service quality lit SERQUAL
Then Oliver's 1981 expectancy disconfirmation model looks more at "direct" measures - the SERVQUAL measured before and after and then looks at the difference. EDP looks at comparisions with "worse than/ better than expected" scale. This model asserts that customer satisfaction is a direct function of subective disconfirmation.
SERVQUAL differs from EDP in that EDP attempts to explain and theorize whereas SERVQUAL looks to describe
Oh points to the fact that EDP is generally accepted by market researchers.
Then moves onto value.
Zeithaml. (1988)
Dodds (1991)
Woodruff (1997)
Parasuraman (1997)
Lots of ambiguity of definitions of value.
This study looks at the diversified views on the consumer purchase decision-making process that are reflected in the models of service quality, customer satisfaction, and customer value.

Thursday 8 November 2007

bolton 1991

A Multistage Model of Customers' Assessments of Service Quality and Value

quite an old deep article - looking primarily at SERVQUAL- from Parasuraman, Berry, Zeithaml.
Looks at Satisfaction (EDP), service quality, service value, perceived quality
The methods looked at local telephone services from 1985
sample of 1408
limitations - phone service (?) multi-stage not really suitable.

martinez 2006

Can Price Promotions Improve Tourist Loyalty to Tour Operators

better article than it seems - appears to be about price promotion which isn't really too relevant, but the methodology is cool
looks at loyalty, attitude, and switching costs.
makes a good distinction between First timer and repeater.
pg 39 instrument
Perceived quality 8 items
switching costs 2 items
to loyalty 2 items

cronin 1992

Measuring Service Quality: A Reexamination and Extension

good article - trying to sort the eternal problem of Service quality ? customer satisfaction / intentions
links well into value.
one of the key articles as it really tries to dig into the issues and arguments.
highlights how complicated the whole issue is.
is serice quality different from satisfaction? how?
uses SERVQUAL (parasuraman, zeithaml, berry 1988)
importance weighted SERVQUAL
SERVPERF
inportance-weighted version of SERVPERF
medium sized city in US
660 usuable questionnaires
banking, fast food, dry cleaning, pest control
generalizable?

Grewal 1998

The Effects of Price-Comparison Advertising on Buyers' Perceptions of Acquisition Value, Transaction Value, and Behavioral Intentions


of limited value - perceived acquisition value discussed, but more to do with products, prices and advertising.
distinction between transaction value and acquisition value (?)
pg 48
I think perceived acquisition value is closer to what i am talking about - perceived value.
Perceived transaction value - more about variations in price - special deals and how peolpe feel about them.

Moliner 2006

Relationship quality with a travel agency: The influence of the postpurchase perceived value of a tourism package

very eloborate model - sample from spain looking at perceived value/satisfaction/ trust / commitment
Interesting veer in to the more emotional side of feelings, rather than the purely rational.
Good blurbs on SATISFACTION, COMMITMENT, TRUST, PERCEIVED VALUE,
Uses GLOVAL scale (?) full scale shown on pg 203
Good breakdown of trust/ satisfaction/commitment instruments pg 205
402 interviews in 3 different cities.
Analysed using LISREL

touches on Ajzen Fishbein

Wakefield 1996

Retailing hedonic consumption: A model of sales promotion of a leisure service

Good study - touches on loyalty and perceived value in a straight forward way - no in-depth discussion.
Perhaps not too applicable as it looks at minor league baseball with fireworks, but the instrument is interesting.
p417
B Loyalty to service provision
3 items
C perceived Quality of service environment
3 items
E. Peceived value of service provision
3 items
F Repatronage Intention
1 item

Tuesday 6 November 2007

Tam 2000

The Effects of Service Quality, Perceived Value and Customer Satisfaction on Behavioral Intentions

excellent article - lit review great - goes into the development of EDP, customer satisfaction, inferred and perceived disconfirmation, performance, perceived performance, service quality, perceived value, and how they are all linked together.
Pg34 has some great lines. Perceived value is conceptualised as a trade-off of perceived benefits relative to perceived sacrifices (monroe 1991). Perceived benefits seen as the "get" component and perceived sacrifices as the "give" component.
Chang and Wildt (1994) found that perceived value was a significant determinant of repurchase decisions.
Methods
Questionnaire given out at a chinese restaurant - 92 usuable responses
3 sections
1 - EDP composite - asking for perfoemance evaluation with expectations and then performance of each attribute.
2 - Overall quality, satisfaction, perceived value and behavioral intentions.
- satisfaction 4 items
- perceived value - 3 items
- behavioural intentions - 4 items
3 demographics
using SEM - structured equation modelling to see the links between EDP, satisfaction, perceived quality, intentions - LISREL 8
regressions looked at
(1) customer satisfaction on perceived value and service quality
(2) behavioural intentions on perceived value and service quality
(3) behavioural intentions on perceived value, service quality and customer satisfaction.
Study showed that satisfaction was a strong determinant of behavioral intentions.
Limitations - value only included monetary value - not time, effort etc.
could be limited to restaurants.

Imrie 2000

Customer Retention and Loyalty in the Independent Mid-Market Hotel Sector: A United Kingdom Perspective

More of a review of literature - takes idea used by Morgan and Dev in the States
looks at CONTEXT, CONTROL, and CUSTOMER
in terms of loyalty.
Context - the customer situation can change
Control - the firm variables - marketing mix - can change
Customer - demographics, background of the customer can change.
Not particularly relevant -
Find studies by Lewis and Pizam... look at how what a customer expects matches up with what the company is trying to deliver.
CONSISTANCY of PRODUCT QUALITY is a variable I can take from this study.
Bejou and Palmer - Service failure and loyalty - 1998

Formica 2002

Segmentation of Travelers Based on Environmental Attitudes

Good piece - looks at segmentation using NEP (new environmental paradigm) -
large scale survey from 1992 - (80,000) people - little bit outdated
p41 goes through the methodological steps - factor analysis - K-mean cluster analysis
multiple discriminant analysis of 42 destination attributes
Tukeys multiple range test
ANOVA
Chi-Square
Breaks down into 4 types - limits of nature
Humans can manage nature
humans over nature
humans abuse and interfere with nature

Ekinci, Y. 2002

Segmenting Overseas British Holidaymakers by Personal Values

Interesting article - employs a modified LOV (List of Values) to segment 320 british holiday-makers - beach in turkey
A number of statistical methods are used (K-means square, chi-square, hierarchical/non-hierarchical...)
2 clusters are found - Relationship seekers and Agenda Achievers - Interestingly found that Relationship seekers perceived higher service quality and satisfaction, were more inclined to return and make recommendations to others.
Need to look into the LOV a bit more maybe.
Also mentioned other scales - RVS and VALS - Rokeach Value Survey - Value and Lifestyle-based segmentation.

Sunday 4 November 2007

Sunday 4th November

found the mintel reports.
All the reports - split by leisure, finance, retail, etc.

photocopied the ethical tourism - 2 main questions.
and the general one - about how people rate different things- boycotts etc.

generally every two years. the individual reports.

had a look at the co-op. they do have a consumer question about some 'ethical acts'

going to have a further read at the reports today.

Friday 2 November 2007

Daily Plan

I think I have beating around the bush for way too long.
I need to decide what I am going to do each day and stick to it, or at least clarify what I have done. Too much mincing. my time is valuable now. I need to make the most of it.

Friday 2nd november - get involved in perceived value literature. try to get inside the literature and see where it can lead. speak to fernando again about this edgar wood lady's article. Visit leeds uni, look at their mintel stuff - do straight from the car. try to investigate co-op 1999 and 2004. methodologies???? - start a log of all articles in loyalty/ repeat purchase/ perceived value.

blog by COB

RTP session

Presented to a few from CCTC and ICRT

Bit of a strange presentation. I don't think I really followed it through properly. I didn't explain what I will look at at all really. It came across very confusing. very confusing.

but i got what I needed out of it.

same old question about the definition of RT came up - again I need to find a way of defining it.
the best thing i can think of is rewording the title to something like 'the role of responsible tourism policy in repeat purchase behaviour in the soft adventure market'

I still see no value in even having a working definition - i can use cape town if I want to, but where is the value?

Other ideas where regarding the open/closed nature of the questions I wanted to ask. I think was aiming for completely closed, maybe choices -- Correia suggested more opportnity for the consumer to voice their opinion.

Anna made a very good point - why make it so RT focussed? Why not just look at loyalty and if RT comes up...

I think that is fair, but I don't think the instrument was ever jsut going to look at RT. It has to look at Perceived value and then see if RT plays a role in this.

XF made the fair point - what other methodologies in this area have I looked at? Where am I pulling my method from? out of my arse it seems.

There must be literature about loyalty - about perceived value - about ranking priorities - where are these articles? GO GET THEM.

Methodologically I sucked. Good tho, because in a years time I'll fooking blow them away.

'All singing, all dancing instrument.' I'll show them it's possible.

Lu raised a good point about stand out RT things - orphanages for example - will they dominate? I think this goes back to Anna's point - this should not be an RT questionnaire.
If RT jumps out, then fair enough.