SERVICE QUALITY AND TOURISTS SATISFACTION THE CASE OF SEVEN TRAVEL AGENTS IN ADDIS ABABA

Abstract

This paper evaluates service quality and tourists satisfaction in Ethiopian tourism, specifically about seven travel agents found in Addis Ababa. The importance of this topic resides in the fact that tourists‟ positive experiences of service, products, and other resources provided by travel agents can produce customer retention as well as positive word-of-mouth, re-visitation, and economic contribution at national level. Indeed, satisfaction with travel experiences contributes to destination loyalty. The degree of tourists‟ loyalty is reflected in their intentions to revisit the destination and in their recommendations to others this all outcome determine mainly by the travel agents quality service offerings and the overall country‟s attraction appeal altogether. Thus, tourist satisfaction in the service is important to tourism stakeholders in order to achieve a competitive advantage. These studies assess service quality and tourist satisfaction by applying SERVQUAL model: comprising five dimensions tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. The sample consists of 116 respondents selected based on convenience sampling, use quantitative research design and both primary and secondary data. The collected data was analysed with the help of SPSS version 20. The gap score between perception and expectation of tourists showed that there is a negative gap score in all service quality dimensions meaning those tourists expectations exceeds their perception. Correlation analyses were used to investigate the relationship between dependent and independent variables. The findings suggested that the studied travel agents need to improve all the dimensions of service quality