Tourism guide cloud service quality: What actually delights customers?

Springerplus. 2016 Oct 4;5(1):1712. doi: 10.1186/s40064-016-3345-4. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

Background: The emergence of advanced IT and cloud services has beneficially supported the information-intensive tourism industry, simultaneously caused extreme competitions in attracting customers through building efficient service platforms. On response, numerous nations have implemented cloud platforms to provide value-added sightseeing information and personal intelligent service experiences. Despite these efforts, customers' actual perspectives have yet been sufficiently understood. To bridge the gap, this study attempts to investigate what aspects of tourism cloud services actually delight customers' satisfaction and loyalty.

Methods: 336 valid survey questionnaire answers were analyzed using structural equation modeling method.

Results: The results prove positive impacts of function quality, enjoyment, multiple visual aids, and information quality on customers' satisfaction as well as of enjoyment and satisfaction on use loyalty.

Conclusions: The findings hope to provide helpful references of customer use behaviors for enhancing cloud service quality in order to achieve better organizational competitiveness.

Keywords: Enjoyment; Loyalty; Overall satisfaction; Service quality; Tourism guide cloud.