Visitors’ loyalty towards Giant Panda Conservation Centre at Zoo Negara, Malaysia

Loyalty has been a major highlight in the tourism industry for being a crucial component to a sustainable business by ensuring a stable flow of visitors in future. It has always been a vital objective of service providers. Visitors are the main focus of any successful tourism business as the need to...

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Main Author:	Thoo, Poh Yee
Format:	Thesis
Language:	English
Published:	2017
Subjects:	Zoo visitors - Attitudes - Case studies
Online Access:	http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/68450/1/FH%202018%206%20IR.pdf
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id	my-upm-ir.68450
record_format	uketd_dc
spelling	my-upm-ir.684502019-05-14T01:18:37Z Visitors’ loyalty towards Giant Panda Conservation Centre at Zoo Negara, Malaysia 2017-12 Thoo, Poh Yee Loyalty has been a major highlight in the tourism industry for being a crucial component to a sustainable business by ensuring a stable flow of visitors in future. It has always been a vital objective of service providers. Visitors are the main focus of any successful tourism business as the need to attract and retain visitors is definitely important to face the concept of quality, productivity, efficiency, growth and survival challenge in this field. Many studies of service quality have proven that these will lead to visitors’ satisfaction and results in visitors’ loyalty. However, many researchers have also identified that a satisfactory purchase experience is not enough to develop loyalty. Visitors’ positive memorable tourism experiences (MTEs) are also very crucial as it is proven to be a more potent driver of future behaviour such as loyalty. MTEs have recently emerged to become an important study for tourism destinations to compete in this rapid growing marketplace. Therefore, in order to create a visitors’ loyalty, bestowing visitors with great service quality and development of positive memorable tourism experiences (MTEs) are essential. Yet, there are currently lacks of studies regarding the relationship among these three dimensions. In conjunction with the sudden drop of total number of visitors in Zoo Negara Malaysia in the year 2015 even after the establishment of Giant Panda Conservation Centre (GPCC), it is crucial for GPCC, Zoo Negara to understand and gain loyal visitors since the giant pandas will be here for 10 years. Hence, the main objective of this research is to examine the factors that influence loyalty in relation to service quality and memorable tourism experience among visitors at GPCC in Zoo Negara. Moreover, this study is to close the theoretical gap by developing a model with these three dimensions which are still scarce in the literature. A quantitative research design was employed in this study. A self-administered survey was carried out with a sample of 217 visitors. A pilot survey was done to test the effectiveness of the questions in the instrument prior to the actual survey. Descriptive analysis and multiple regression analysis were used to analyse the data. The results showed that the visitors of GPCC have various socio-demographic and economic backgrounds. Overall, the visitors are positive of service quality, MTEs and loyalty towards GPCC. From the socio-demographic characteristics, visitors’ education level and gross monthly salary are found to affect the visitors’ loyalty.Lastly, the relationship among service quality, MTEs and loyalty had been determined and become clearer. Service quality and MTEs are indeed the antecedents of loyalty. In addition, MTEs has been found to mediate the relationship between service quality and loyalty with a full mediation which has helped to expand the current literature. In a nutshell, apart from providing a high quality of service, understanding the visitors’ MTEs is important when implementing segmentation and positioning strategies for a tourism destination as it will affect a visitor’s loyalty. Zoo visitors - Attitudes - Case studies 2017-12 Thesis http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/68450/ http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/68450/1/FH%202018%206%20IR.pdf text en public masters Universiti Putra Malaysia Zoo visitors - Attitudes - Case studies
institution	Universiti Putra Malaysia
collection	PSAS Institutional Repository
language	English
topic	Zoo visitors - Attitudes - Case studies
spellingShingle	Zoo visitors - Attitudes - Case studies Thoo, Poh Yee Visitors’ loyalty towards Giant Panda Conservation Centre at Zoo Negara, Malaysia
description	Loyalty has been a major highlight in the tourism industry for being a crucial component to a sustainable business by ensuring a stable flow of visitors in future. It has always been a vital objective of service providers. Visitors are the main focus of any successful tourism business as the need to attract and retain visitors is definitely important to face the concept of quality, productivity, efficiency, growth and survival challenge in this field. Many studies of service quality have proven that these will lead to visitors’ satisfaction and results in visitors’ loyalty. However, many researchers have also identified that a satisfactory purchase experience is not enough to develop loyalty. Visitors’ positive memorable tourism experiences (MTEs) are also very crucial as it is proven to be a more potent driver of future behaviour such as loyalty. MTEs have recently emerged to become an important study for tourism destinations to compete in this rapid growing marketplace. Therefore, in order to create a visitors’ loyalty, bestowing visitors with great service quality and development of positive memorable tourism experiences (MTEs) are essential. Yet, there are currently lacks of studies regarding the relationship among these three dimensions. In conjunction with the sudden drop of total number of visitors in Zoo Negara Malaysia in the year 2015 even after the establishment of Giant Panda Conservation Centre (GPCC), it is crucial for GPCC, Zoo Negara to understand and gain loyal visitors since the giant pandas will be here for 10 years. Hence, the main objective of this research is to examine the factors that influence loyalty in relation to service quality and memorable tourism experience among visitors at GPCC in Zoo Negara. Moreover, this study is to close the theoretical gap by developing a model with these three dimensions which are still scarce in the literature. A quantitative research design was employed in this study. A self-administered survey was carried out with a sample of 217 visitors. A pilot survey was done to test the effectiveness of the questions in the instrument prior to the actual survey. Descriptive analysis and multiple regression analysis were used to analyse the data. The results showed that the visitors of GPCC have various socio-demographic and economic backgrounds. Overall, the visitors are positive of service quality, MTEs and loyalty towards GPCC. From the socio-demographic characteristics, visitors’ education level and gross monthly salary are found to affect the visitors’ loyalty.Lastly, the relationship among service quality, MTEs and loyalty had been determined and become clearer. Service quality and MTEs are indeed the antecedents of loyalty. In addition, MTEs has been found to mediate the relationship between service quality and loyalty with a full mediation which has helped to expand the current literature. In a nutshell, apart from providing a high quality of service, understanding the visitors’ MTEs is important when implementing segmentation and positioning strategies for a tourism destination as it will affect a visitor’s loyalty.
format	Thesis
qualification_level	Master's degree
author	Thoo, Poh Yee
author_facet	Thoo, Poh Yee
author_sort	Thoo, Poh Yee
title	Visitors’ loyalty towards Giant Panda Conservation Centre at Zoo Negara, Malaysia
title_short	Visitors’ loyalty towards Giant Panda Conservation Centre at Zoo Negara, Malaysia
title_full	Visitors’ loyalty towards Giant Panda Conservation Centre at Zoo Negara, Malaysia
title_fullStr	Visitors’ loyalty towards Giant Panda Conservation Centre at Zoo Negara, Malaysia
title_full_unstemmed	Visitors’ loyalty towards Giant Panda Conservation Centre at Zoo Negara, Malaysia
title_sort	visitors’ loyalty towards giant panda conservation centre at zoo negara, malaysia
granting_institution	Universiti Putra Malaysia
publishDate	2017
url	http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/68450/1/FH%202018%206%20IR.pdf
_version_	1747812577742684160

Visitors’ loyalty towards Giant Panda Conservation Centre at Zoo Negara, Malaysia

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