Tourism Destinations: Antecedents to Customer Satisfaction and Positive Word-of-Mouth

Abstract

This study investigates various aspects of the servicescape with a view to isolate the factors that contribute to customer satisfaction and positive word-of-mouth (PWOM) recommendation of a tourist destination. Three models for each dependent variable were developed using the physical servicescape as the base model, adding the social variables, and adding the emotions experienced by the tourist. Variance decomposition was used to isolate the contribution of each group to the variance explained and the importance of the shared variance component. The results indicate that there is significant incremental variance explained as each group of variables is added to the baseline model. The results further suggest that people factors and emotions are strong predictors of customer satisfaction and PWOM. The implications of the study for academics and practitioners are provided together with the limitations of the study.