Impact of urban heritage tourism on tourist satisfaction in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Cultural/heritage tourism is the fastest growing segment of the tourism industry in the world. Present studies show that USA, European tourists are interest in traveling to cultural/ heritage destinations have increased recently and are expected to continue. The recent studies about cultural/heritage tourism focused on the characteristics of tourists who visited cultural/heritage destinations. This study attempts to investigate the relationship between cultural/heritage destination attributes and tourist satisfaction, and to identify the relationship between tourist satisfaction and re visit to the destination. The expectancy-disconfirmation theory provided a conceptual framework for this study. This theory holds that consumers first form expectations of products or service performance prior to purchasing or use. The study area for this study was Kandy heritage destination as Kandy known as a cultural capital in a Sri Lanka. 75 questionnaires were used for analyze the data. Therefore, the data from 75 respondents were collected and analyzed in this study. The respondents were tourists who visited at the Kandy urban heritage tourism destination. The survey was conducted at five different places in the Kandy urban heritage tourism destination such as Daladamaligawa, Kandy lake, Peradeniya botanical garden, Gadoladeniya temple and Embekkedewalaya. To achieve the objective of the study there are different hypothesis were established. To find out to find the relationship between urban heritage tourism features and customer satisfaction regression analysis & correlation were used. Under urban heritage tourism features food quality, environment, service quality, accommodations and historical places are included. When analyzing the urban heritage tourism features with customer satisfaction by multiple regressions and correlation, food quality service quality, environment, accommodation and historical places were significant effect on customer satisfaction. Since all five dimensions have a critical impact on customer satisfaction, the tourism operators should pay more attention; continue to improve themselves in every aspect of their operation in order to exceed their customer’s expectation.