To encourage the sustainability of rural tourism and to achieve success in the tourist industry, an understanding of the factors by which tourists are motivated to visit rural areas is required. This study aims to measure factors affecting rural tourists’ satisfaction in relation to different aspects of a destination and to increase the likelihood of revisitation and recommendation. This study ...

The tourist trip design problem (TTDP) refers to a route-planning problem for tourists interested in visiting multiple points of interest (POIs). TTDP solvers derive daily tourist tours, i.e., ordered visits to POIs, which respect tourist constraints and POIs attributes. The main objective of the problem discussed is to select POIs that match tourist preferences, thereby maximizing tourist sati...

The aim of the study was to examine the effects of psychological empowerment (PE) on job satisfaction and job performance of the tourist guides. It was tried to determine whether psychological empowerment and its dimensions effect guides' satisfaction and performance level. In order to reach the aim, the questionnaire form was developed and applied to 381 tourist guides in Turkey. The study's r...

There is growing evidence that customer satisfaction is a driving force behind firm’s business competitiveness and performance (Parasuraman et al., 1985, 1988; Zeithaml et al., 1996). This is absolutely true in the case of tourism, where there is a wide application of concepts, models and tools aimed to evaluate customer satisfaction. It is recognized in fact that, in order to identify the stre...

In this paper, we propose an experiential approach to tourist segmentation aimed at overcoming the limits of both socio-demographic and context-specific approaches widely adopted in the literature and in practice. In this study, segmentation is carried out based upon the expected experiences of Chinese tourists at the Shanghai World Exposition. The segmentation reveals four tourist clusters wit...

Based on the level empowerment system and the linguistic operator, a satisfaction evaluation process is proposed in this paper. First of all, a level empowerment system is established to generate the weight of each surveyed tourist. Then, some new linguistic operations are defined which can remedy the defects of the existed operations. Besides, the expectation and variance in linguistic informa...

In order to improve tourist satisfaction and promote the coordinated development of tourism and urban, this paper investigates an urban transportation network problem for tourism via lane reservation strategy. The focus of the problem is to select some lanes from the existing transportation infrastructure and convert them to reserved lanes for tourism so that tourist satisfaction can be ensured...

Before traveling, tourists need to ensure that they will have a well-organized trip, which mainly involves a smooth flow of visits to different tourist attractions by themselves or following a pre-designed plan made by tourism service providers. The present study examined how the sequence of visiting tourist attractions influences tourist satisfaction at the expectation and experience levels. P...

[Abstract] Wireless access with handheld devices is a promising addition to the WWW and traditional electronic business. Handheld devices provide convenience, portable access, and large amounts of information to travelers. Tourism presents considerable potential for the use of new mobile technologies; however, limited research exists on mobile users’ perspectives with regard to satisfaction tow...