CULTURAL TOURISM EXPERIENCE ON CUSTOMER SATISFACTION: EVIDENCE FROM THAILAND
1. INTRODUCTIONCultural tourism has become a critical part in establishing the attractiveness of tourism destinations (Nolan and Nolan, 1992; Harrison, 1997; Prentice, 2001, Richards, 2002; McKercher et al. 2005) According to Richards (1997) cultural tourism defined as all movements of persons for essentially cultural motivations with the intention to gather new information and experiences to satisfy their cultural needs. Thus, cultural tourism is traveling undertaken with historic sites, museums, the visual arts, and/or the performing arts such as study tours, performing arts and other cultural tours, travel to festivals and other cultural events, visit to sites and monuments travel to study nature, folklore or art or pilgrimages (Tighe, 1991; World Tourism Organization, 1985) As an industry, cultural tourism is extremely service driven in which service quality is a major issue. This study takes a marketing approach to allow a focus on some of the main drives of customer satisfaction in cultural tourism. From a marketing perspective, service quality plays an extremely important role in determining the tourist satisfaction which is the aim that both private and public cultural tourism providers strive to achieve (Voon and Lee, 2009) Understanding of service quality viewed by customers can provide insights on how to highlight quality as critical objectives for revitalising tourism industry. As such, service quality has become the centre of attention in all sectors of cultural tourism as greater understanding of tourists is essential to achieve more effective development and marketing of cultural tourism (Craik, 1997).Although previous researches has been widely discussed the concept of service quality by tourism researchers (Otto and Ritchie, 1996; Petrick and Backman, 2002; Al Sabbahy, Ekinci and Riley, 2004; Tam, 2004; Petrick, 2004; Gallarza and Saura, 2006; Sanchez et al. 2006; Moliner et al. 2007; Ryu, Han and Kim, 2008) only a limited number of empirical studies have attempted to comprehensively investigated tourists' satisfaction in cultural attractions. Given the importance of the aspect of service quality in all facets of the tourism industry, this study addresses this gap in the literature by empirically investigating tourists' satisfaction in cultural tourism through festivals in Thailand. Specifically, this study focuses on satisfaction perceived by tourists' experiences and also explores the relationships between cultural tourism experiences. A better understanding of these relationships enable service providers and researchers gain insights into knowing tourists' perceived value and appraisal emotion, and adjust their services to meet tourists' satisfaction.2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESES DEVELOPMENTTourists' satisfaction with their experience has become important for contemporary tourists in cultural tourism (Poria, Reichel and Biran, 2006; Reisinger and Steiner, 2006; Yeoman, Brass and McMahon Beattie, 2007) In marketing perspective, satisfaction is the attitude consequence from the comparison of the expectation of performance and the perceived performance of the service experience (Oliver, 1980) Considering tourists as customer, customer satisfaction is primarily referred to as a function of pre travel expectations and posttravel experiences. Further, Gill, Byslma and Ouschan (2007) and Ryu, Han and Kim (2008) explored that perceived value may be a better predictor of behavioural intentions than either satisfaction or quality. Value refers to the mental estimate that consumers make of the travel product, where perceptions of value are drawn from a personal cost/benefit assessment (Morrison, 1989) As such, the time or money spent in a trip is compared with tourists' experiences gained from that visit. In this sense, perceived value elicits form an assessment of the product or services purchased at the destination (Steven, 1992) In this study, service is what is that cultural tourists buy when they consume an experience, participate in an event (Lehman, Wickham and Fillis, 2014)