www.elsevier.com/locate/jtrangeo
a,*
, Peter Schoeld
b,1
Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow GL4 0LG, UK
Management and Management Sciences Research Institute, University of Salford, Salford M6 6PU, UK
Abstract
The availability and perceived quality of local transport at tourist destinations has latterly been established as exercising an inuence
on visitor experience, overall satisfaction and repeat visitation. The dimensions of urban public transport performance used by overseas
visitors to evaluate quality and their relative contribution to overall destination satisfaction are investigated by this paper for the case of
Greater Manchester. It is concluded that the inuence of public transports ease of use on destination satisfaction is greater than the
inuence of eciency and safety. Overall, however, perceived performance of the public transport system has only a minor inuence
on destination satisfaction.
2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Public transport; Destination satisfaction; Performance measurement; Urban tourism; Service quality
1. Introduction
Studies of urban public transport service quality and
performance from the passenger perspective typically focus
on the attitudes of local users regarding the adequacy of
existing public transport provision. Whilst these studies
are productive in achieving their aim of informing the quality provision of urban public transport, there has so far
been limited attention to the attitudes and experiences of
visitors to urban destinations with regard to public transport provision. Within the tourism literature, there has
been some recognition of the inuence of public transport,
in terms of its availability and suitability for use by visitors,
on both the visitor experience of a destination and its perceived attractiveness. Laws (1995), writing on the attractiveness of a tourist area, identied transport as one of
the secondary destination features which contribute to
the attractiveness of a destination. Equally, transport is
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 141 548 4801; fax: +44 141 552 2870.
E-mail addresses: karen.thompson@strath.ac.uk (K. Thompson),
p.schoeld@salford.ac.uk (P. Schoeld).
1
Tel.: +44 161 295 4579; fax: +44 161 295 2020.
0966-6923/$ - see front matter 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2006.11.004
repeatedly identied as one of the key elements of the overall tourism product at a destination (Jansen-Verbeke, 1986,
1988; Gunn, 1988; Middleton, 1998; Page, 2004).
Thus, the urban tourism product is made up of a range
of goods and services, of which transport is one, and which
together form the visitor experience. Where an urban
destination wishes to benet from tourism, improved
provision of touristic goods and services can strengthen
competitive advantage (Suh and Gartner, 2004). Indeed
for former industrial cities, which have sought to use tourism as a tool for regeneration, the absence of conventional,
heritage-based tourism resources potentially renders the
provision of excellence in other elements of the tourism
product more important. Where the goal of urban tourism
planning is to foster greater dispersal of the benets of
tourism throughout the city, the role of the transport network may indeed be critical (Evans and Shaw, 2002).
Within this competitive market, demand for customer centred service delivery systems may be an important factor in
inuencing the use of local transport services by tourists
(Page, 1999). However, tourism planners seldom have a
signicant inuence on public transport planning, which
tends to be founded on local population densities and
137
138
the overall experience of the destination. Principal components analysis on a list of attributes representing likes and
dislikes and reasons for visiting coastal destinations found
that the quality of local transportation services and destination airport services accounted for two of eight factors
delineated in the case of both destinations. Whilst they
failed to establish, through stepwise regression, that either
of these factors on their own was a signicant indicator of
intention to revisit the same destination, they did nd that
the availability of these transport services had a signicant
inuence on intention to revisit other destinations in the
same country. Moreover, Kozak (2002) also found statistically signicant dierences in levels of satisfaction with local
transport services between visitors to Majorca and Turkey
to be greater than on any of the other seven factors. However, it should be noted that Kozak (2001a) established
overall satisfaction with the holiday experience to be the
strongest predictor of likelihood of revisiting both the same
destination, and other destinations within the same country,
and it is the role of transport within this overall level of satisfaction with which this paper is concerned.
In the case of urban destinations, Avgoustis and Achanca (2002) found the availability of local transportation
services to be rated fourth in importance for visitors to
Indianapolis, out of fourteen attributes used to measure
destination satisfaction. Moreover, the same study identied local transportation services as one of four attributes
which possessed an above average ability to inuence destination choice. The performance of transport related attributes such as ease of getting around the city, and
accessibility of the city have also been measured in other
studies of urban destination satisfaction (Bakucz, 2002;
Freytag, 2002). Indeed Qu and Li (1997) went into further
detail by measuring satisfaction levels of mainland Chinese
visitors to Hong Kong with a number of aspects of public
transportation including variety of choices, convenience,
cleanliness, comfort and eciency and cost.
Whilst the above studies have provided some evidence
that local transport is a contributing factor to destination
satisfaction, none have attempted to investigate in detail
the specic attributes and dimensions of public transport
performance which inuence visitor satisfaction levels with
the destination, and the relative inuence of these dimensions on overall satisfaction with the destination. There is
therefore clear scope for further work in this area, towards
which end, it is rst of all necessary to identify the attributes of public transport which are recognised to constitute
transport quality and are regularly used in the measurement of urban public transport performance.
3. Measuring public transport performance
Whilst the internal quality of a public transport service
can be measured on the basis of whether hard performance
targets, often set by the service provider, have been met, a
measure of true quality relies on eliciting customer perceptions of the performance of the service and is considered
pay were information at the bus stop and clean stops and
vehicles. By contrast, reducing journey time was not a high
priority for bus users.
A later study, Prioni and Hensher (2000) summarised
bus performance attributes employed in a series of previous
studies (Hensher, 1991; Brewer and Hensher, 1997; Swanson et al., 1997) and organised these into six quality dimensions relating to aspects of the journey: accessing the bus
stop, wait time, trip, vehicle, driver and information. Prioni
and Hensher (2000) attempted to quantify bus travellers
preferences for dierent levels of performance using
revealed preference and stated preference techniques, in
order to identify the contribution of each performance attribute to overall quality of service. Their ndings suggest, in
contrast to Swanson et al. (1997), that bus stop infrastructure does not have an important inuence on quality of service. Developing their work further, Hensher et al. (2003)
shed greater light on the importance of attributes of bus
performance in creating satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Travel time and fare were found to have the greatest inuence
on negative satisfaction, whereas frequency and ease of getting a seat were found to be the greatest sources of positive
satisfaction. Whilst results diered across geographic bus
service segments, cleanliness and driver friendliness were
found to have limited relevance across all segments; their
suitability as performance attributes in measuring service
quality is therefore questioned by the authors.
A further study of interest used a distinctive approach,
arguing that negative critical incidents have a greater
impact on customer perceptions of service quality than
positive critical incidents and therefore attempting to identify performance attributes through passenger complaints
(Friman et al., 1998). Negative critical incidents were found
to fall into seven categories, consistent across three dierent critical incident techniques: treatment and action, punctuality, information, technical malfunction, vehicle design
and space, transport planning and other. Friman et al.
(1998) note that the large majority of complaints pertained
to customers treatment by sta and sta response to negative critical incidents. The most important dimensions of
public transport quality were found to be employee behaviour, reliability (e.g. punctuality) and simplicity (information). In a later study, a fourth dimension relating to
comfort, security and cleanliness (labelled design) was
substantiated (Friman et al., 2001).
The above review has established a number of salient
attributes and dimensions of public transport performance,
quality and satisfaction which provide an insight into how
overseas visitors may measure public transport performance. In addition to the key attributes of travel time and
fare, attributes pertaining to customer care, reliability (especially punctuality), information provision, cleanliness, comfort and security are also conrmed as being important
measures of performance. However, the studies measuring
public transport performance have not adequately distinguished between frequent and infrequent users or business
and leisure users and it therefore remains unclear, whether
139
overseas visitors might be aected by personal and/or external factors, such as language diculties or lack of local
knowledge, which may lead them to engage dierent or additional performance attributes. Findings from a study by
Paine et al. (1969) support the hypothesis that leisure and
business users of public transport rate quality attributes differently on their importance, if not their performance. Hensher et al.s (2003) nding that travel time makes a signicant
contribution to negative satisfaction, may be less likely to
apply to the leisure visitor, for whom travel time may be a
less signicant attribute of a satisfactory journey than the
ability to engage in sightseeing during the trip. Moreover,
the accessibility of the urban tourism product potentially
acquires a high level of signicance in the measurement of
transport performance. Visitors may place a particularly
high value on knowledgeable transport employees who are
not only familiar with the route, but can also advise on connections to other modes of transport and access to visitor
attractions. They may thus experience higher levels of dissatisfaction both with public transport and the destination
where this minimum requirement is not present.
Performance measurement has been the subject of considerable debate in terms of the comparative analysis of
models using expectations-performance, importanceperformance and performance-only visitor satisfaction
constructs (Kozak, 2001b). The intuitive appeal and
widespread use of the (dis)conrmation approach i.e. the
expectations-performance construct and the diagnostic
value of the importance-performance design notwithstanding, the performance-only model represents the
winning ticket with respect to predictive validity. A number of studies on camp sites (Dorfman, 1979; Fick and
Ritchie, 1991), events (Crompton and Love, 1995), restaurants (Yuksel and Rimmington, 1998) and visitor destinations (Fallon and Schoeld, 2004) have demonstrated the
superiority of the performance-only conceptualisation
over the other models. The performance-only model was
therefore used to examine overseas visitors perceptions
of urban public transport quality and the contribution of
relevant performance dimensions to their overall satisfaction with the destination. Thus, the two key objectives of
the paper were:
1. to identify the salient dimensions of public transport
performance from the perspective of overseas visitors;
and
2. to identify which dimensions of public transport performance, if any, have a predictive eect on destination
satisfaction.
4. Methodology
4.1. Measurement instrument
Whilst the transport literature discussed in Section 3
above allowed the identication of a core list of attributes
140
Bus
Walking
Train
Metrolink (Tram)
Own car
Taxi
Hire car
Private coach
Other
Cycling
28.7
27.6
19.1
12.6
11.4
6.8
3.8
3.7
2.6
2.1
141
aective variables that explain eciency and safety respectively. Factor 3 (0.84 alpha) explains 12.79% of the variance; it loads on the two variables that represent the ease
and safety of parking a car in Manchester and as such it
was labelled good parking. Factor scores were calculated
using the AndersonRubin method to ensure least possible
correlation.
5.3. Predictive eect on destination satisfaction
A multiple regression analysis was subsequently carried
out, with overall destination satisfaction as the dependent
variable and the three factors as independent variables, in
order to establish whether any of the above factors possesses predictive power over destination satisfaction. A
number of cases were excluded from the analysis as they
did not have complete data for one of the variables. Nonetheless, a sample size of 275 with three predictor variables
is considered able to detect relationships with R2 values of
approximately 5% at a power of 0.80 at the 95% signicance level (Hair et al., 1998). Assumptions of normality,
linearity and homoscedasticity were tested. Examination
of the residuals did not show any non-linear pattern and
indicated that the assumption of homoscedasticity had
been met. The Durbin Watson statistic (1.90) conrmed
the independence of errors. Some outliers were present,
but their number was considered acceptable for the sample
size and Mahalanobis and Cooks distance statistics did
not provide any evidence of inuential cases (Barnett and
Lewis, 1978; Cook and Weisberg, 1982). The largest VIF
value (1.050), the average VIF (1.04) and the tolerance
statistics (>0.95) indicated the absence of collinearity in
the data. In addition, the predictors were found to have
most of their variance loading onto dierent dimensions
(eigenvalues).
The results of the regression analysis are given in Table
3. The R value of independent variables on the dependent
variable (0.21) shows that destination satisfaction is only
weakly inuenced by the factors; the value of adjusted R2
is small according to Cohens (1988) benchmarks and suggests that they account for only 4.5% of the variability in
destination satisfaction. The shrinkage between the R2
and the adjusted R2 values is 0.01, indicating that if the
model were derived from the population rather than the
sample, it would account for approximately 1.0% less variance in the outcome. The F ratio value (4.333) is signicant
(p < 0.005) indicating that the beta coecients can be used
to explain each of the factors relative contribution to the
variance in destination satisfaction, although only factor
1 (ease of use) makes a signicant contribution to the
prediction of destination satisfaction (t (275) = 2.97,
p = 0.003) and this accounts for only a small amount of
the variance in destination satisfaction. For a one unit
increase in public transports ease of use, destination satisfaction increases by only 0.18 units.
The assumptions of regression analysis were not met
for the variable overall destination satisfaction and the
142
Table 2
Dimensions of public transport performance
Factor 1
Factor 1: Ease of use
Public transport in Manchester is easy to use
I am able to nd the information I need to make journeys by public transport
Any problems or questions I had were dealt with eectively
It is easy to buy the right ticket for your journey
Public transport sta are helpful
Factor 2
0.778
0.775
0.734
0.729
0.713
0.841
0.811
0.763
0.753
3.34
30.32
30.32
0.85
5
Table 3
Regression analysis: overall satisfaction with destination
Unstandardised
beta coecient
Constant
Factor 1: ease
of use
Factor 2:
eciency
and safety
Factor 3: good
parking
5.099
0.198
Standardised
beta
coecient
0.712
0.662
0.597
0.580
0.876
0.865
Eigenvalue
Variance (%)
Cumulative variance (%)
Cronbachs alpha
Number of items (total = 11)
Signicance
0.178
78.094
2.973
<.001
0.003
0.051
0.046
0.756
0.450
0.079
0.071
1.183
0.238
Communality
0.616
0.628
0.582
0.551
0.540
Variable
Factor 3
2.25
20.46
50.78
0.83
4
0.770
0.753
1.41
12.79
63.56
0.84
2
satisfaction. Satisfaction with attributes of private transport (parking) was shown not to be a signicant predictor
of destination satisfaction. Enhancing the internal accessibility of the tourism product by public transport should
therefore arguably take precedence. The ndings further
appear to indicate that the soft attributes of transport
quality (Harrison et al., 1998) are a better predictor of destination satisfaction for the case of Manchester than the
more readily quantiable hard attributes. This presents
potential diculties for the monitoring of an adequate level
of service provision in the areas of ticketing, customer service and transport information for overseas visitors to
Manchester. With regard to individual modes, although a
higher percentage of overseas visitors use the bus than
any other mode, destination satisfaction levels are less closely correlated with bus satisfaction, than with satisfaction
with other modes, possibly as a result of lower expectations
in relation to bus travel. It is therefore suggested that Manchesters rail and Metrolink systems should be the main
focus of any specic eorts to tailor public transport to
overseas visitors use in Manchester.
The paper has highlighted a number of key issues in the
provision of public transport for overseas visitors to a specic urban destination. The small but signicant role of
public transport performance as a predictor of satisfaction
with Destination Manchester has been established using an
attribute based model and statistical techniques common to
both transport and tourism research. Evidence of a link
between satisfaction with urban public transport and destination satisfaction, hypothesised within the tourism literature, has been strengthened. Moreover, the study has
conrmed the usefulness of attribute based measurement
techniques from the marketing and tourist behaviour literatures to the study of public transport SQ. Domestic visitors were excluded from this study on the basis that they
would perceive attributes of public transport performance
in a more similar way to local users. Future research should
target domestic visitors in order to test the accuracy of this
hypothesis and determine whether the measurement model
is applicable in other contexts. There is also scope for more
detailed investigation of the link between private transport
and the visitor experience, which has been largely overlooked by this study.
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