مدل دو عاملی رضایت مصرف کننده Two factor model of consumer satisfaction: International tourism research

1. Introduction Research has shown that consumers try to retaliate for failed services, regardless of who is directly responsible for the service in question (Ariely, 2007; de Quervain, Fischbacher, Treyer, & Schellhammer, 2004). For example, an unsatisfied restaurant customer may attempt to penalize the wait staff by leaving a smaller tip, even if the wait staff is not responsible for the unsatisfactory food. At other times, a customer may try to punish a higher level of authority, such as a restaurant owner or an entire city. The same idea can be applied to tourism. When people travel using tour packages, they are under the impression that they are visiting Paris or London, not a package route of a travel company. Tourists can blame the whole city for an unsatisfactory experience. Consequently, it may be useful to implement policy-level controls on tourism management instead of relying on individual companies’ service control. In recent years, policymakers have begun to embrace behavioral economics to make interventions for human behavior and decisionmaking (Bhargava & Loewenstein, 2015). This approach was popularized as a “nudge” by a best-selling book with the same title (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). Nudges can alter people’s behavior in predictable ways without removing options or significantly changing economic incentives (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). For example, human behavior can be modified by strategically placing fruit in the school lunch line. In the present study, we hypothesized that tourism satisfaction can be improved without fundamentally changing tour programs or providing economic incentives. We chose theories of behavioral economics that can be seamlessly incorporated into the guided tour programs without interfering with ongoing activities. First, we investigated whether tourism satisfaction can be improved by providing additional information before each activity to build up participants’ expectation for the upcoming activities. Second, we investigated whether the sense of reciprocity can increase tourism satisfaction. Third, we examined whether we could increase tourism satisfaction by highlighting the end of the tour program. We also measured effects of nonmanipulated variables such as weather and previous visits to the city on tourists’ satisfaction and their attitudes toward future visits.