Efficient Satisfaction Building: A Comparative Study of Ski Resorts

Destination managers aim at increasing and maintaining visitor satisfaction. In this study the authors examine the levels of efficiency which ski resorts attain in pursuing this objective for a sample of 54 Austrian, French, German, Italian, and Swiss ski resorts based on a survey totaling 12.234 cases. Configurations of resort attributes lead to some level of overall satisfaction. An individual satisfaction item contributes to overall satisfaction depending on the simultaneous value of other items. Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is tailor-made for demonstrating the holistic effect of such item configurations. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) extracts the differences with regard to efficient satisfaction building and paves the way for resort bench-marking by proposing best-fitting bench-marking partners. As results indicate, destinations need not deliver top service quality in all satisfaction dimensions to achieve above average overall satisfaction.