From Travelers Expectations to Travelers Experiences: The Workability of the HOLSAT Model

This book focuses on the Australian occidental tourists’ expectations and satisfaction in one of the oriental tourist destinations such as Vietnam. It makes use the HOLSAT model to assess the holiday satisfaction of Australian travellers to Vietnam, and it is the second known application of this model. It seriously looks at the capabilities of the existing theoretical models to assess the tourist expectations and satisfaction and highlight the importance of the HOLSTAT model in understanding explicitly the differences between Expectation and Experience. An examination of various sample segments has tested the effectiveness of the HOLSAT model. Gender and the mode of travel were investigated and have determined the differences amongst various segments of Australian tourists who visited Vietnam. This aspect of using the HOLSAT model to study segmentation was differed from the one undertaken by Tribe and Snaith (1998). From a theoretical point of view, the findings from this study have demonstrated the workability of the HOLSAT model as a useful instrument for measuring holiday satisfaction and also for segmenting tourist market. The HOLSAT model has great potential because it does not require a fixed menu of attributes, generic to all destinations, compared with some other satisfaction models that seek to apply the same attributes to different situations. From a practical approach, this book also looks at the destination marketing implications for the results obtained through the administration of normal parametric measures. This is an important feature of the research findings since it helps the tourism industry at large to design products and services that suit myriad segments of the international, national and regional tourism markets.