A conceptual model of the roles of price, quality, and intermediary constructs in determining behavioral intention to visit a festival

A clear understanding of the relationship among three performance indicators (perceived service quality, perceived service value, and satisfaction) would inform tourism businesses and organizations which of these evaluation measures were the most useful indicators of visitors behavioral intentions. Perceived service quality is a userÂs judgment about a serviceÂs overall excellence or superiority (Berry, Parasuraman and Zeithaml 1988). Perceived service value has been recognized in the past decade as one of the most salient determinants of purchase intention and repeat visitation (Bolton and Drew 1991; Chang and Wildt 1994; Jayanti and Ghosh 1996). Previous studies (Grewal, Monroe and Krishnan 1998; Jayanti and Ghosh 1996; Oh 1999; Sweeney, Soutar and Johnson 1997; Zeithaml 1988) suggested that perceived service value which is defined as a trade-off between visitors perceptions of the Âgive and Âget components of a service (Zeithaml 1988) mediates the influence of perceived price and perceived service quality. Satisfaction is a visitorÂs affective and evaluative response to the overall product or service experience (Oliver 1997). What visitors receive from their investment (money, time and other resources) on a tourism trip are psychological benefits. Thus, it is an experience that visitors receive from interacting with the tourism product, and satisfaction is an evaluation of the level to which these psychological benefits are received (Crompton and Love 1995). This study is an examination of the relationships between visitors perceived service quality, perceived service value, satisfaction and behavioral intentions. Respondents were visitors who attended the Cajun Catfish Festival in Conroe, Texas and were systematically selected. Findings revealed that: a) a structural model operationalizing perceived service quality as a set of attributes fit the data better than an alternative model that measured quality by using a visitorÂs judgment about a serviceÂs overall excellence or superiority; b) among the constructs analyzed perceived service value appeared to be the best predictor of behavioral intentions; and c) of the four dimensions of service quality of a festival, generic features and comfort amenities had the most influence on determining perceived service quality