A Non-Standard Methodology to Measure Tourist Satisfaction (⋆) Una metodologia non standard per la misurazione della tourist satisfaction

The modern discipline of customer care is paying more and more attention on the centrality of customers in the modern business organization. It is even more true if we consider the tourist industry where the market globalization and the competition of the emerging Countries is getting more and more hard. Nowadays it is unimaginable to plan a new kind of touristic service/product not considering the needs of the customers, their homeland and the satisfaction level of their travel. Acquiring just one more tourist is similar to throw a stone into a pond, which only makes positive shockwaves. That means added value and occupation for business. This effect becomes stronger and stronger if we consider a happy tourist, satisfied of his destination and who wants to come back to the same place for a longer period. It spars off a winning marketing mechanism, that is the so called ’word of mouth’. Several researches, based on some classical models well known in literature, have studied the matter of the customer satisfaction application. They measure the customer satisfaction computing the differential among the expectations and the perceptions (Zeithaml et al, 1990, Parasuraman et al., 1994) or quantifying directly the perceptions (Lee et al. 2000), in order to obtain a customer satisfaction index linked to the tourist destination. In this work we propose a methodology to measure the tourist satisfaction (TS) based on the employment of a strategy of non-parametric models, whose aim is to individualize a set of optimal weights for the construction of a synthetic indicator of customer satisfaction. The knowledge of the role played by the latent dimensions of the satisfaction allows to support the management in the allocation of resources.