The effect of travel experience on price–satisfaction link – evidence from group package tours

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates how a tourist’s travel experience influences the relationship between tourism price and tourist satisfaction based on the data of group package tours in Taiwan. Our empirical evidence indicates an inverse U-shaped impact of price on satisfaction. On the other hand, the price–satisfaction relation could be affected by the moderating influence of travel experience to become a U-shaped function (for first-time visitors).

KEYWORDS:

• Travel experience
• price
• satisfaction
• group package tour
• first-time visitor

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Quality is crucial in the literature of price–satisfaction relation. To be more specific, it is the quality ‘perceived’ by the consumer that often lies in the core of relevant studies in managerial science and even in economics. For example, Kahneman and Tversky (1979), Cronin et al. (2000), Yi and La (2003), and Pedraja and Yague (2004). As widely recognized in many studies, price is a proxy to the perceived quality in this paper.

2 See, for example, Jee et al. (2011), in which consumer expectation, motivation, perceived quality, satisfaction, customer’s complaint and loyalty are causally linked and their hypothesized relations tested.

3 The Tourism Bureau of MOTC (Ministry of Transportation and Communications), Taiwan has been conducting the survey annually since 1994. It adopted the quota sampling method to assure a random and representative sample by controlling the characteristics of inbound visitors. Being constantly collected in a large scale, the statistical quality of the data set is high and has contributed to, for example, Chen and Chang (2012) and Chang, Chen, and Meyer (2013). One of the blemishes is the lack of questions about quality, for which we use price as a proxy.

4 Accommodation and transportation constitute the so-called basic GPT in the literature (Wong & Kwong, 2004, for example). On the other hand, meal and itinerary (destination attractions) are usually included in the all-inclusive GPT (Lo & Lam, 2004). In a recent study by Wang et al. (2013), ‘tour leader and tour guide’ was identified to be one of the most important service features of GPTs.