Designing a Most Suitable Questionnaire for Measuring Tourists’ Satisfaction in Wildlife Viewing Context

Soliciting relevant information to measure the quality-of-service tourists receive and measuring tourist satisfaction has been problematic to service providers and academics. The subsequent result of failing to solicit the right information to measure the quality of service provided and tourists satisfaction has often resulted in wrong information being gathered and wrong decisions based on wrong information and its analysis has resulted in wrong decisions. The weakness of SERVQUAL as a generic model to measure customer satisfaction based on the questionnaire designed with 5 dimensions and 22 items falls far too short to measure tourists’ satisfaction in a wildlife viewing context which led to the formulation of a questionnaire with 21 dimensions and 121 items which comprehensively measure tourists satisfaction, whilst it was empirically tested and proven. The aim of the study is to provide an exemplar questionnaire that can be used to measure the quality of service provided to tourists in a game viewing context and measure tourist satisfaction in the same context. The same questionnaire can be used as a marketing toolkit for branding by tourism stakeholders. The questionnaire was used as the case study, with a critical document review of already existing literature. A number of recommendations were made including paying attention to the format and layout of the questionnaire which should be appropriate, the appropriate language of the questionnaire, questionnaires that answer research questions, questionnaires that are theoretically grounded, adoption of the exemplar questionnaire especially by researchers in tourism marketing and management, managers, policy makers, and tourism authorities.