Effects of Chinese Sport Tourists’ Perceptions toward Service Quality in Jeju Island

Purpose: This study proposed a research model to examine the effect of the service quality of the sport tourism industry on Chinese tourists’ satisfaction and future intention and subjective well-being in Jeju Island. Methodology: Data were recruited from 349 Chinese tourists, who participated in sport activities in Jeju Island. Findings: The findings indicate the physical environment quality and outcome quality have positive influences on tourist satisfaction. Tourist satisfaction significantly and positively influenced tourists’ future behavioral intentions and subjective well-being. All Chinese respondents positively evaluated the service quality in Jeju Island. Value: This study contributes to the understanding of the sports tourism industry targeting Chinese tourists in Jeju Island.


Introduction
Jeju Island is one of the most popular destinations for Chinese tourists.In 2014, approximately 2,859,000 Chinese tourists visited Jeju, accounting for 86% of the island's 3,328,300 foreign visitors (Jeju Tourism Organization, 2015).The sports tourism industry is also one of the major attractions in Jeju Island, offering many leisure, sports, and recreational activities, including golfing, horse riding, hunting, fishing, and mountain climbing (Jeju Special Self-Governing Provincial Tourism Association, 2015).Although sporadic studies have addressed Jeju Island as an important destination for the Korea tourism industry (Park & Njite, 2010;Seo, Park, & Yu, 2009), little attention has been paid to understanding the role of sports tourism as a destination attraction for international tourists.
Because the sports tourism industry is a service industry, it is strongly influenced by the quality of services (Thwaites & Chadwick, 2005).Many studies have suggested service quality and tourist satisfaction result in higher levels of tourist loyalty, which lead to economic gains for destination and tourism enterprises (Chen & Chen, 2010;Chen & Tsai, 2008;Hutchinson, Lai, & Wang, 2009).Similarly, it has been suggested that tourism can bring psychological benefits for tourists (Dann, 2012).However, studies examining antecedents of psychological benefits are limited (McCabe & Johnson, 2013).Also, only a few studies have investigated the economic and socio-psychological effects of service quality on tourist satisfaction and future intention to revisit Jeju Island.
Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore how Chinese tourists' perception of service quality toward sports activities in Jeju Island affects their satisfaction and future behavior.Subjective well-being is a socio-psychological outcome, and future behavioral intention is one of the important economic outcomes.Understanding Chinese tourists' subjective well-being and future behavioral intention can provide various implications for practitioners of sports tourism industry in Jeju Island.This study attempts to (1) explore the relationships among service quality, tourist satisfaction, and its outcomes-future behavioral intentions and subjective well-being; and (2) evaluate Chinese sports tourists' perceptions of service quality toward sports activities in Jeju Island.

Sports Tourism
From a broader point of view (Higham, 2007;Standeven & Knop, 1998), sports tourism is described as traveling for non-commercial reasons or business.It is also defined as all forms of active and passive involvement in sports activities in a casual or organized way for non-commercial or business/commercial reasons that necessitate travel away from home and work locality (Standeven & Knop, 1998).Gibson (1998) has proposed three recognizable types of sports tourism: visiting sports-related attractions, watching sporting events, and participating sports activities.In this study, we concentrate on active participation, also referred to as "active sports tourism."

Service Quality
Although studies on service quality in the business world began in the early 1980s, the advantages of services quality in sports and recreational industry were noticed by researchers and practitioners in recent years.Service quality has attracted significant interest in sports marketing research (K Alexandris, Dimitriadis, & Kasiara, 2001;K Alexandris, Zahariadis, Tsorbatzoudis, & Grouios, 2004).There are distinguished studies regarding service qualities within sport occasions as well (Kelley & Turley, 2001;Shonk & Chelladurai, 2008;Tsitskari, Tsiotras, & Tsiotras, 2006).
However, valid and reliable measurement of service quality has been a controversial issue in the service marketing literature (Brady & Cronin Jr, 2001).Most studies applied the SERVQUAL model, developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry (1985).However, some have argued the SERVQUAL model is not fully applicable to sport, leisure, and recreational settings (Kouthouris & Alexandris, 2005).An alternative model, proposed by Brady and Cronin Jr (2001) and Rust and Oliver (1993), has been extensively applied to outdoor leisure research (Alexandris et al., 2004;Theodorakis, Kaplanidou, & Karabaxoglou, 2015).Theodorakis et al. (2015) posit three-dimension assessment of outdoor leisure services: outcome quality, interaction quality, and physical environment quality."Outcome quality" relates to the fulfillment of a customer's expectations after participating in an activity."Interaction quality" refers to customers' experience with activity personnel."Physical environment quality" relates to service components, such as ambient conditions, social factors, and design of the activity.

Tourist Satisfaction
Satisfaction may be the most comprehensively researched variable in tourism literature.Satisfaction has been defined as the discrepancy between perceived performance and prior expectation after consumption (Oliver, 1980).According to Chen and Chen (2010), within the context of tourism, satisfaction is defined by the gap between pre-travel expectations and post-travel evaluations.
Satisfaction is viewed as a separate, but related, concept of service quality (Spreng & Mackoy, 1996).Zeithaml, Bitner, and Gremler (2006) assert satisfaction is the consumer fulfillment response.It is a judgment that a product, service feature, or the product or service provides a pleasurable level of consumption-related fulfillment (Zeithaml et al., 2006, p.86).Various studies in the service marketing literature have demonstrated these constructs are closely related (Alexandris et al., 2001;Spreng & Mackoy, 1996).

Future Behavioral Intentions
In the tourism literature, it is an acceptable notion that, when the product, services, or other resources offered by travel destinations satisfy tourists, this could result in repeated visits and positive spoken words that influence colleagues and/or relatives (Meng, Tepanon, & Uysal, 2008).Several practitioners and researchers have closely examined the effect of tourist satisfaction on future behavioral intentions, and customer dissatisfaction and satisfaction have come to be seen as the driving force that shapes customers' future behaviors and attitudes (Cole & Scott, 2004).
The extensive review of SWB studies has proven that many factors specifically affect SWB (Deiner et al., 1999; ass.ccsenet.

Research Instrument
The survey questionnaire was composed of 27 items.The service quality variable was measured by an 11-item and 3-dimension scale proposed by Alexandris et al. (2004) and Brady and Cronin Jr (2001).The scale of tourist satisfaction was a three-item measure developed by Fornell, Johnson, Anderson, Cha, and Bryant (1996).Future behavioral intentions (3 items) were adopted and modified from Boulding, Kalra, Staelin, and Zeithaml (1993).
A three-item scale of subjective well-being developed by Theodorakis et al. (2015) was used to assess the perception of experiential purchases on people's happiness.All scale items were evaluated on a five-point Likert scale, ranging from (1) strongly disagree to (5) strongly agree.Also, six items with demographic information questions were included.One open-ended question "What disappointed you most during your sports tour in Jeju Island?" was included in the questionnaire.
To increase the accuracy of the translation, a professional translator translated the original English version into Chinese, and other translators did a back translation into English from Chinese.In addition, native speakers checked the Chinese and English versions.This procedure was performed following the guidelines for blind back translation by Hsu, Kang, and Lam (2006).

Data Analysis
In the data analysis procedures, descriptive, inferential, and thematic analyses were employed to answer the research questions.The SPSS 20.0 (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) program and AMOS 19.0 (Analysis of Moment Structure) software were used to analyze the data.
Next, the reliability of the structural model was examined by CR and AVE values (Table 2).All CR values satisfied the criterion (0.70) set by Fornell and Larcker (1981).The CR values ranged from 0.820 (physical environment quality) to 0.922 (subjective well-being).All AVE values were also above 0.50, which exceeded the recommended level proposed by Hair, Black, Babin, Anderson, & Tatham (2006).The AVE values ranged from 0.536 (physical environment quality) to 0.798 (subjective well-being).Therefore, the structural model showed adequate reliability.Also, discriminant validity was examined by correlation analysis among the latent variables (Fornell & Larcker, 1981).The correlation analysis results (Table 3) showed none of the correlations were above the suggested 0.85 cut-off value (Kline, 2016).The highest correlation was 0.794 between subjective well-being and tourist satisfaction, showing the structural model had good measurement properties.
These results revealed physical environment quality and outcome quality significantly affect tourist satisfaction, supporting H1 and H3.This finding partially followed prior studies that service quality is a significant antecedent influencing customer satisfaction (Brady & Cronin Jr, 2001;Clemes, Brush, & Collins, 2011;Cronin Jr & Taylor, 1994;Rust & Oliver, 1993).
However, the path from interaction quality to tourist satisfaction was not significant, and H2 was not supported.This finding contradicts previous studies that personnel quality positively influenced satisfaction (Brady, Voorhees, Cronin Jr, & Bourdeau, 2006;Theodorakis, Kambitsis, & Laios, 2001;Yoshida & James, 2010).This may be attributed to the language barrier between Chinese tourists and Korean locals staff and residents.Many Chinese tourists do not feel comfortable communicating with staff in English or Korean.It is necessary to provide tourist information (e.g., maps, guides) in Chinese.(Lee, 2015).The other possible reason could be that interaction between sports tourists and the staff was limited.This is consistent with some previous findings (Theodorakis et al., 2015;Theodorakis, Tsigilis, & Alexandris, 2009) that interaction quality did not affect skiers' psychological attachment or loyalty to the ski center, unlike the physical environment and outcome quality.Also, Theodorakis et al. (2015) found an interaction component examined in the study had no significant effect on event satisfaction because runners in 5 km and 10 km races had little time to interact with event personnel.Therefore, it can be concluded that the interaction between Chinese sports tourists and service providers (e.g., Korean staff) in Jeju Island was limited due to the language barrier and the nature of the sports activities.
This study also found tourist satisfaction was a significant predictor of future behavioral intention and subjective well-being, consistent with previous findings (Chen & Chen, 2010;Chen & Tsai, 2008;Cronin Jr & Taylor, 1994;Hutchinson et al., 2009).In the sports tourism context, Clemes et al. (2011) found professional rugby spectators were more eager to recommend the activity to others, with a higher level of satisfaction.This is also consistent with Theodorakis et al.'s (2015) recent finding that highly satisfied sports event participants would be happier if they invested their leisure time and resources in similar future events.
ass.ccsenet.Outcome quality.Outcome quality received the highest rating among the three predictors of service quality (M = 4.12).This suggests respondents were more conscious of what they gained from the sports tourism experience than of the physical environment or interaction factors.Several studies have noted outcome quality is close to the quality of experience (Kouthouris & Alexandris, 2005).Sports tourists could be considered "experience consumers," and tourism organizations should consider themselves "experience providers," and service providers should focus their marketing on the experience offered rather than the price (Chan et al., 2015).For example, destination marketing organizations (DMOs) could design new sports programs with more entertainment or open cultural arts festivals to provide memorable experiences for tourists in Jeju Island.

Implications
The current study investigated the relationships between service quality, tourist satisfaction, and its outcomes (i.e., future behavioral intentions and subjective well-being) to understand the role of service quality in participating sports activities in Jeju Island.Several theoretical and managerial implications emerged from the findings and are discussed below.

Theoretical Implications
First, the findings provide insight from the perspective of active sports tourists, unlike most previous studies that only focused on spectators of various sports (Brady et al., 2006;Shonk & Chelladurai, 2008;Theodorakis et al., 2001;Yoshida & James, 2010).This study targeted active sports tourists to investigate their perceptions of service quality in Jeju Island to expand the literature on sports tourism.
Second, the results contribute to the literature by revealing the dynamic interplay among service quality components and how they drive tourist satisfaction.While some studies have shown that evaluating service quality in the sports recreation industry is a multi-dimensional structure (Brady & Cronin Jr, 2001;Thwaites, 1999), few studies have explored each dimension specifically.
Third, the current study also provides an empirical investigation of the socio-psychological outcomes (e.g., subjective well-being) of sports tourism in Jeju Island.We must emphasize the role of sports tourism marketing as a key factor in enhancing tourists' subjective well-being by satisfying their needs (Theodorakis et al., 2015).

Managerial Implications
The main managerial implication of this study is that tourism organizations, particularly DMOs, in Jeju Island must provide high-quality services to attract more Chinese tourists.Highly-perceived quality of services helps foster greater tourist satisfaction, which improves tourist behavioral intentions and subjective well-being.
On the other hand, Chinese tourists' travel behaviors and lifestyle are rapidly changing, particularly among the younger generation (Lee et al., 2011).Having a thorough understanding of the culture of Chinese tourists and grasping new trends in this population are essential for encouraging more Chinese tourists to visit Jeju Island (Lee, 2015).One of the best ways to do this would be to highlight Jeju Island's unique cultures, such as Korean wave (Hallyu) culture (Zeng, Chiu, Lee, Kang, & Park, 2015).Not only does Hallyu culture influence many Asian countries, including China, but it is also a crucial tool for attracting potential tourists and enhancing the local image (Kim, Lee, & Chon, 2010).Recent Internet technologies are playing an essential role in Chinese outbound tourism (Huang, Keating, Kriz, & Heung, 2015).We recommend DMOs incorporate mobile applications (e.g., WeChat) into sports tourism marketing in Jeju Island.

Limitations and Suggestions
This study has limitations.The first limitation is its unique focus on actual trip behaviors and its distinction of sports tourists from other tourists.While this group might include regular visitors, classified as sports tourists in this study, they may not have participated in sports activities (e.g., hiking) with the goal of doing sports.Second, this study investigated the perceptions of Chinese sports tourists generically, without considering differences between those on package tours and independent tourists.The two travel modes had different characteristics (Becken and Gnoth, 2004;Vainikka, 2014), which may have led to different perceptions among the tourists.Third, previous studies showed the difficulty of defining tourist satisfaction in outdoor leisure services, because tourists may be satisfied with the service in sports programs but not with their participation experience (Alexandris et al., 2004;Chan et al., 2015).Therefore, a deeper exploration of tourist satisfaction in the sports tourism context is needed in future research.

Table 5 .
Descriptive analysis of service quality

Table 6 .
Categorized themes of open-ended question