Tourist Satisfaction in Bangladesh: An Analysis of Apparel Fashion Retail Industry

In the modern era, organizations need to compete in satisfying their local and tourist consumers due to dynamic nature of competition. Moreover, satisfying tourist customers is more challenging than local customers as the contemporary tourists want to live unique experience and are not interested in purchasing standardized products/services. The purpose of the study is to develop and test a conceptual structural model that explores the dimensions of service quality and tourist customer satisfaction and their relationships in the context of Bangladesh apparel fashion retail. In the study, data are collected from the domestic tourists currently living in Chattogram and foreign tourists who visit Dhaka and Sylhet in Bangladesh through an established questionnaire and Factor Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approaches are performed. The results highlight five dimensions of service quality, where the dimension “Problem Solving and Physical Aspects” has the greatest impact on tourist satisfaction, followed by Inspiring Confidence and Reliability, Store Size, Courteous/Helpfulness and Policy and Product Information under multiple regression method. The findings also report that most important dimensions of tourist’s satisfaction are quality and brand Image and retail Image; indicating tourists less think about product price rather they want to enjoy different experience during travel. Finally, the study concludes that service quality of apparel fashion industry in Bangladesh has positive impact on tourist satisfaction. Therefore, the apparel fashion retailers should take strategies to improve the quality of their services to ensure they remain competitive in a global market environment.