SKIQUAL© : A Customer Satisfaction Assessment Model For the Leisure Industry

The United States economy, as well as the economies of several other highly industrialized nations, has experienced significant changes in sector composition over the last fifty years. The United States economy has shifted from manufacturing to a service based economy, where services represent almost eighty per cent of gross domestic product. An economy that is predominately focused on manufacturing, typically measures the standard of living based on the goods that are produced and consumed, which is easily quantified. However, as economies move to a more services based composition, the measurement of the quality of living becomes more complex, due to the focus on the quality of the experience of service received by consumers. There are substantial gaps between traditional manufacturing quality metrics and services quality measures possibly due to the rapid change in GDP structure and lags in academic research. The authors of this paper acknowledge these gaps and make a contribution by extending of an existing services satisfaction model and empirically testing the modified model with survey data collected from the North American skiing industry. Our rational is supported by intuitive and objective observations that as economies evolve, increases in per capital income as well as increases in disposable income follow. As discretionary income increases, and consumption patterns migrate to an experience economy, demand for leisure activities increase, along with the need for newer methods for measuring service quality