Analysis of Service Quality & Tourist Satisfaction Levels with Reference to Tourist Information Centres (TICS) in Kandy City

Abstract

Tourist Information centre (TIC) is "a clearly labeled, publicly accessible, physical space with personnel providing pre-dominantly free of charge information to facilitate travelers' experiences" (Pearce, 2004). Tourists who arrive to each destinations visit TICs for receiving trustworthy information for their journey. Hence, TICs can be a strong strategic point to promote tourism of a region. Therefore, it is essential to pay attention on the service quality of the TICs and this paper sets out to report on research that investigated foreign tourist satisfaction on service quality in TICs. Foreign tourists who visited TICs in Kandy were taken as the population to the study and the convenience sampling technique was used to select the sample consisting 100 respondents from the population. Primary data were collected through a questionnaire and quantitative technique was employed to analyze the data. The results revealed that there is a significant and positive relationship between service quality in TICs and further, the tangibility dimension has mostly contributed for foreign tourist satisfaction than the other dimensions. The study further concludes that in order to increase the tourist satisfaction in TICs, the attention should pay on improvement of the service quality dimensions providing modern equipment and informative interior to TICs. Findings of this study will be important for tourism planners and decision makers in the tourism industry.