Empirical Analysis Of Tourists' Satisfaction Structural Equation Model

Nowadays, people’s demand for travel becomes increasingly individualized. Thesame is true that the concept of consumption is experiencing great changes. Therefore,tourist satisfaction degree has been brought under the focus of the tourism industry.Located in the southwestern border area, Yunnan, one of the major tourist attractionsin China, is blessed with amazing scenery, brilliant ethnical customs and manycultural heritage sites. However, some factors, either natural or man-induced, haveexerted some negative impact on its tourist market. For example, terrible trafficconditions and the high possibility to be affected by natural disasters. Besides,frequent negative reports on traveling, rising complaints from tourists and theintensifying competition caused by the diversification of the tourism market alsocontribute to the decline of the industry. One effective and powerful way to achievethe leapfrog development of Yunnan’s tourism industry is to improve touristsatisfaction. Tourist satisfaction can not only reflect the appeal and competitiveness oftourist attractions, but can also instruct the management staff to adjust administrativepolicies so that the level of administration and quality of service can be promoted.Through these measures Yunnan will be able to attract more tourists, increase itsincome and eventually realize the sustainable development of the tourism industry.Based on the domestic and international customer satisfaction researchbackground, the article focuses on the tourist satisfaction index system of the modelbuilding, estimates of the model and index inspection. It introduces the existingclassical models: Sweden Customer Satisfaction Barometer model (SCSB), AmericanCustomer Satisfaction index model (ACSI) and Europe Customer Satisfaction indexmodel (ECSI). After full analysis and comparison, the article decides to choose theECSI model and discusses the latent variables measurements of the ECSI model andthe relationship between the Latent variables. On the basis of discussion, combiningwith the characteristics of tourism industry, the article builds up the index system ofthe model. According to the different properties of tourists: the gender and age, thearticle analyzes the diversity among the influence factors of tourist satisfaction respectively. The parameters of the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) areestimated and tested though the Maximum Likelihood (ML), Generalized LeastSquares (GLS) and Partial Least Squares (PLS). Then, judging by the results, thearticle analyzes the factors of the model.Study shows: the tourist satisfaction diversity of different attributes is notsignificant, but the influence factors: product variety and richness of entertainment,satisfaction of the female was obviously higher than that of men. In index of catering,the taste of the food and environmental aspects, male satisfaction is significantlyhigher than women’s satisfaction; On the items and the taste of the food and beverage,and satisfaction of15to24year old age group was obviously higher than that of otherage groups of satisfaction; In the commodity price index,15to24year old age groupof satisfaction and the satisfaction of all age groups over55significantly lower thanthose aged between25and54satisfaction; In the travel convenience, aged25to54satisfaction is relatively high.In the view of analysis methods, the Covariance method has an advantage inparameter estimation and the fitting test; the PLS method has an advantage on theregression coefficient estimation and the explain ability of the latent variables.Therefore, in the process of empirical analysis, it is necessary for evaluation tocombine with the two kinds of modeling method.Study also shows that tourism image, tourist expectation, perceived quality haveboth a direct impact and indirect effects on tourist satisfaction degree. Among theinfluence factors, tourists expectations is top of the list, the second is the tourismimage. In addition, the factors influencing the loyalty, the top of the list is tourists’satisfaction degree, followed by tourist expectations.