Research On The Service Quality Evaluation Of Higher Educational Tourism

Human being’s challenges and explorations of a new world can come true through tourism activities and their intellectual curiosities can be satisfied by educational activities to learn or acquire something consistently.Educational tourism is as one part of the Special Interest Tourism, and the main purpose of travel is education and learning. Accordingly, human being’s fundamental desire for them can be met in the form of educational tourism. This educational tourism includes general educational tourism, silver tourism, language study abroad, school field trips and even exchange student programs in domestic and foreign University (Ritchie, 2002).China is has a history of more than 5000 years with ancient civilization and rich education resources. After China’s economic reform and opening up, a lot of students chose China as the destination of educational tourism following the globalization and Chinese economic growth. Among them, a significant proportion of students were from Korea. In other words, Korean students abroad have made up a particularly large percentage of the students in the past ten years.The main purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the educational tourism’s service quality, students’ performance, satisfaction and loyalty in order to find out the sustainable ways to improve or develop China’s educational tourism. To accomplish this purpose, both theatrical researches and objective researches were done. First off, in terms of theatrical research, the main definition and characteristics of educational tourism, its services, satisfaction and loyalty were researched based on literature researches. In addition, the relationship between educational tourism’s service quality and customer satisfaction, and the relationship between customer satisfaction and their loyalty were analyzed on the basis of preceding researches.For analysis of this research, online survey was mainly implemented. Participants in this study were Korean students in China or Korean university students with study ex perience in China, and they answered a questionnaire on the Internet. Lastly, collected survey data were analyzed with SPSS.Results from quantitative data of this study can be summarized as follows. First, educ ational tourisms’ service quality has a positive effect on students’ performances, and thei r performances have a meaningful impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty. Further more, customer satisfaction has a meaningful influence on their loyalty. In other words, these factors are closely related to each other. Second, instructor, educational, and admi nistrative service factors of educational tourisms’ service quality have a meaningful effe ct on students’ performance and loyalty. The satisfaction level of educational tourism ser vice quality is from high to low in turn to instructor factor, educational factor, finance fa ctor, facilities factor and administrative factor. Consequently, instructor, educational and administrative service factors need to be complemented and improved in order to devel op educational tourism’s service quality in China.