Building Tourist Loyalty through Service Quality: Mediating Role of Tourist Satisfaction Insights from Emerging Tourism Market

Purpose: Service quality, tourist satisfaction and loyalty are the most critical concern in the tourism sector, particularly in emerging market, where destinations and service provider seek to fined sustainable solation to retain tourists and ensure long-term performance and competitiveness. Despite extensive research of these constructs in highly competitive market, limited empirical research has been done in emerging tourism contexts. Therefore, the current study aims to explore the direct effect of service quality (SQ) on tourist satisfaction (TOSA) and loyalty (LOY) with focus on the mediating role of tourist satisfaction in this relation. Design/Methodology/Approach: A quantitative research design and structured questionnaire were employed for data collection from emerging tourism contexts. An over-all of 397 legitimate answers, the proposed hypotheses were tested by SEM. Findings: The result of this study revealed that, SQ has positive direct effect on TOSA and LOY, and direct effect of TOSA on LOY. Furthermore, the result confirms the partial mediating role of TOSA in this relationship. These results highlight the vital role of TOSA as mechanism to enhance the link between service delivering and behavioral outcomes. Implications/Originality/Value: This study offering insight and empirical support of the mechanism mediating the role of TOSA, it adds to the body of the literature on tourism. The finding suggests tourism provider to integrates improvement initiatives of service quality with systematic evaluation of satisfaction to enhance tourist loyalty and repeating visit and sustain competitive performance.