Service Quality Dimensions and Inbound Tourists' Shopping Satisfaction in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Shopping is one of the most significant and popular tourist activities. Travellers are looking to buy various items at destinations for consumption and use and as souvenirs of their trips. Tourist shopping activities are enormously important at any destination since they produce additional revenue for the destination's tourism, and this situation is even more critical in international tourism because it can generate foreign revenue for an economy. Service quality and customer satisfaction are predominant concepts in consumer research and are known as highly interrelated. This research also looks into the effect of service quality dimensions on the shopping satisfaction of foreign visitors visiting Sri Lanka, which will eventually help the upliftment of the tourist shopping industry in the country. A structured questionnaire was utilized to gather data from international visitors who had shopping experiences in the country. Data were collected at tourist shopping outlets in Kandy adopting a purposive sampling technique, and the total number of usable responses was 126. The correlation and regression analyses show that the service quality dimensions and shopping satisfaction correlate highly. The service quality aspects of responsiveness and assurance, in particular, have proven statistically significant effects on international visitors' shopping satisfaction. The findings of this research fill the gap of research requirement of service quality and customer satisfaction in inbound tourists' shopping behavior. Moreover, the tourist shopping industry managers would find the results helpful in further developing the quality of the services rendered to the customer.