The PolyU Tourist Satisfaction Index (PolyU TSI), a project spearheaded by the SHTM's Chair Professor of Tourism and Associate Director, Professor Haiyan Song, is a pioneering project attempting to comprehensively and continuously monitor tourist satisfaction. Launched at PolyU on 17 December, the PolyU TSI will provide government agencies responsible for tourism-related activities, different sectors of the tourism industry and the general public with much needed information for decision making and planning.
Tourism is one of Hong Kong's major economic pillars, and tourism satisfaction is clearly an important issue for local organisations that depend on inbound tourists. Research indicated that satisfied tourists are likely to stay loyal to a destination.
Based on a sophisticated model and a vigorous research framework, this innovative evaluation system intergrates alternative approaches and captures multiple dimensions of tourist satisfaction. The framework is able to produce tourist satisfaction indices for individual tourism sectors which can then be used to estimate an overall destination satisfaction index.
Individual indices can be estimated for various source markets of individual tourism-related sectors on regular basis to monitor the dynamics of any destination's competitiveness over time. Of particular interest to Hong Kong will be the ability to benchmark the local indices against those of other destinations.
Several cities within the Pearl River Delta Region, including Macau and Shenzhen, also showed interest in using the PolyU TSI to assess their strengths as a tourism destination.
The project has currently produced satisfaction indices for the seven important regional source markets of the six tourism-related sectors in Hong Kong.
With an improved ability to measure the satisfaction of its customers, the Hong Kong tourism industry will continue to bolster local economic development. The SHTM is proud to support its industry in this new way, and looks forward to the added wellbeing the PolyU TSI will bring to the community.
