Determining the critical factors of the tourism value chain: An importance-performance analysis

The value chain is a chain of activities that a firm operating in a specific industry performs in order to present a valuable product or service for the market. To manage the tourism product as an end-to-end seamless product, a tourism value chain concept should be developed, despite the huge performance measurement literature for the manufacturing industries little research has been conducted for the tourism industry. Although great emphasis is given to service quality and customer satisfaction issues and their link to the business performance in the tourism industry, it is surprising not to see a customer-oriented approach in the tourism value chain. The present study tries to sweep over this limitation as its primary aim is to investigate the tourism value chain fish bone model in order to attain effective improvement in the tourism value chain. To accomplish this end, this study used an importance-performance analysis (IPA), to examine customers' perceived importance and operation of six factors that may influence the overall character and efficiency of the value chain process. The six investigated factors were: “Frontier service”, “Tours and excursions”, “Tour operators”, “Transport related services”, “Accommodation service”, and “Other service”. The IPA grids have illustrated that the Tour operators and Transport Related Services factors fell into the Concentrate here quadrant; accommodation services and tours and excursions in the Keep up the good work quadrant; and other services and Frontier Services in the Low Priority quadrant. No attribute has been identified in the Possible Overkill quadrant.