Perceptions on Seaside Resort Areas’ Services: A Case of Chinese Tourists in Phuket, Samui and Krabi, Thailand

Abstract

The objectives of this study were to analyze the service management from the facility, personnel, and marketing factors for Chinese tourists who visited seaside resort areas in the southern part of Thailand. The researcher used a survey questionnaire to collect data from 400 Chinese tourists who visited seaside resort areas in the southern region of Thailand and used descriptive statistics, One-Way ANOVA, and Multiple Regressions to analyze and test the data.
The results found that Chinese tourists who visited the seaside resorts revealed that most services they're received from the resorts exceed their expectations including online bookings, personalized service, respectfulness, polite language, smiling faces, and technical supports. However, the tourists think some services could not reach their expectations which included prices for food, accommodation, local transportation, commodity, and entertainment. The personal services that could not reach their expectation were local authorities’ ability to handle emergency situations and could not provide fast services for the safety of the tourists. As for the resort area management, the tourists observed that there were not enough legal safety frameworks in protecting Chinese tourists, lacking convenience of using local transportation in the seaside resort areas, low-development infrastructure, and did not have enough facilities and activities for the tourists’ recreational. The results finally found a significant positive relationship between service management and Chinese tourists’ introducing the resort areas to others, and a significant impact of resort areas’ marketing management on perceptions of the Chinese tourists’ service management at a statistically significant level .05.