Efficient Satisfaction Building: A Comparative Study of Ski Resorts

Destination managers aim at assuring high visitor satisfaction. Efficiency in satisfaction building has been a neglected issue in tourism research. In this study the authors examine the levels of efficiency which ski resorts attain in pursuing this objective. Configurations of satisfaction dimensions lead to some level of overall satisfaction. If high ratings for all dimensions are not necessary for achieving top overall satisfaction, destination managers get room for efficiency improvement. In a mixed-methods approach the authors analyze data from a sample of 54 Austrian, French, German, Italian, and Swiss ski resorts based on a survey totaling 12,234 cases. The two methods, Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), complement each other. An individual satisfaction item contributes to overall satisfaction depending on the simultaneous value of other items. QCA shows the holistic effect of such item configurations. DEA extracts the differences with regard to efficient satisfaction building and paves the way for resort benchmarking by proposing best-fitting benchmarking partners. Results indicate that destinations need not deliver top service quality in all satisfaction dimensions to achieve above average overall satisfaction. 33 out of 54 resorts turn out to be inefficient in their satisfaction building efforts.