After decades of rapid growth in tourism, Austria and its neighboring regions in Germany, Switzerland and Upper Italy have over the past three years experienced sustained declines in the number of tourists visiting their destinations. While the alpine Central European regions may be a special case, all of Europe has experienced a decline in its world market share from 66% to 59% (Eurostat 1995). This has rekindled the public debate over the possible causes of this decline with price and price related factors (such as exchange rates) and quality being the major explanatory factors. Contrary to the past when price and income explanations have dominated (Keane; Schulmeister; Smeral and Witt) quality or value for money are now moving as possible explanations to the forefront (Mazanec 1996). As for the traditional activities of alpine tourism such as hiking and skiing and traditional quality attributes such as accessibility and friendliness, they no longer seem to suffice to attract a large number of tourists to areas such as Switzerland, or the alpine parts of Austria and Northern Italy, as can be evidenced by the declining number of overnight stays over the past years.

A number of researchers have in this context written about changing attitudes and behavior of tourists and their service quality expectations (Opaschowski, 1996; Poon; Ryan and Weiermair, K. 1994 Quality Management in Tourism: Lessons from the Service Industries. AIEST Congress on Tourism Research: Achievements. Failures and Unresolved Puzzles, pp. 93–114. St Gallen, Switzerland.Weiermair, 1994). If their hypotheses are correct, one should be able to observe, even among those who have already made destination choices, possible service quality deficits with respect to such new quality attributes as animation and fun or freedom of choice. Survey research will be presented which has been carried out in 11 winter sport resorts in Austria and Northern Italy involving a sample of 1,822 tourists vacationing during various periods in those resorts in the winter season of 1994–95. The survey aimed at obtaining correct quality measures for service quality broadly defined in seven domains of tourism activity: food and accommodation, sports activities (other than skiing), animation and culture, transportation aspects to and within resorts, skiing and related activities, enjoyment with nature and landscape, and shopping activities (Table 1).

The design of quality attributes and associated quality measures of alpine tourism has been heavily influenced by a rich and growing literature on the construction and use of quality attribute measures in services (Brown; Chase; Fick and Parasuraman). The final choice of quality attributes and related questions had to be tempered with the chosen mix of the seven tourism activities. These seven attributes emerged as the most valid dimensions of service quality to be used for alpine winter destinations (Table 2). Pretests were undertaken both with respect to a set of quality attributes originally derived from Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry (1985:47) and with the different wording of questions addressing these quality dimensions. The pretests involved tourists, tourism operators, and tourism official

Tourist judgments on service quality

Some authors have suggested that attribute importance can be used as a proxy for measuring expectations (Dall’ Aglio, 1996 and Kohli:124; Toy, Rager and Guadagnolo 1989). Hence, as a methodological starting point, the SERVQUAL model, which measures the gap between expectations and perceptions of the service by the consumer, as an indicator of service quality, was employed (Parasuraman and Zeithaml).

The quality observations in the study reported here were scored with a five-point Likert scale. Each questionnaire contained sociodemographic and other background information on the tourist in addition to its partial and final assessments concerning the seven quality dimensions found in each of the domains of activity: tourists were asked to indicate the importance of each attribute in each of the seven activities yielding 49 partial quality assessments. In addition they were also asked to assess the final importance of each of the major activities and seven quality dimensions. Similarly they were requested to provide the same partial and final quality assessments in terms of experienced satisfaction. Using different multivariate analyses the paper attempts to explain final satisfaction and importance scores based on partial quality scores in each of the seven domains of tourism activity. Put differently, the exercise was to statistically estimate theoretically defensible weighting schemes for each of the single quality judgments across all activities, thereby explaining or interpreting tourists’ final quality assessments.

On the use of quality judgments of tourists: some theoretical issues

Following a number of researchers, the service quality construct was arrived at by comparing a service quality level which the consumer expects to receive (“importance” is used as proxy indicator) and the service quality level which he/she has experienced (“satisfaction” is used as proxy indicator). According to the model, the higher the level of expectation relative to the perceived quality experience the lower the level of perceived quality and vice versa (Gr; Parasuraman; Parasuraman and Parasuraman Sasser; Zeithaml and Heskett). The main theoretical and empirical issue of this paper rests with tourists’ varied assessments of service quality but once a major holiday decision has been made and tourists find themselves vacationing in a particular destination, one cannot entirely exclude prepurchase/preconsumption decision criteria and behavior. Expectations or importance “standards” are formed for the most part prior to the decision making process and thus have a bearing on the subsequently used SERVQUAL measurement tool for service quality. As has been pointed out in the literature, customers may have different expectation levels regarding quality attributes ranging from desired to adequate to equitable and/or best brand norms (Stauss and Seidel 1995) thereby influencing the absolute measure of discrepancy between quality expectation and quality experience (i.e., perceived quality).