Entrepreneurship und Tourismus

S. 241Introduction

“Tourism is a service-intensive industry that is dependent on the quality of customers’ service experiences and their consequent assessments of satisfaction or dissatisfaction” (Zehrer, 2009, p. 332). The purpose of a tourism business or tourism destination (such as cities) is to create and maintain satisfied customers, which are attracted via marketing techniques (Kotler et al., 2014; Middleton et al., 2009). Thus, customer orientation is at the center of attention, which means that tourism businesses and destinations have to know the preferences of the customers and subsequently design a customer-driven marketing strategy to remain competitive on the market and retain customer value and satisfaction among the customers (Kotler et al., 2014).

In the traditional service industries such as tourism, hospitality and airlines, where there is very little difference between the offerings of competing firms, customers assess value primarily on the basis of the quality of service (Kandampully, 2002; Sureshchandar et al., 2002). Thus, service has become the value assessment component, or the “identity” of the firm in the eyes of the customer, whether the firm offers products or s...