lad

,*,

ent,

Ins

st ddil de

Greater Manchester. It is concluded that the inuence of public transports ease of use on destination satisfaction is greater than theinuence of eciency and safety. Overall, however, perceived performance of the public transport system has only a minor inuence

are productive in achieving their aim of informing the qual-

the attractiveness of a destination. Equally, transport is

destination wishes to benet from tourism, improved

Within this competitive market, demand for customer cen-tred service delivery systems may be an important factor ininuencing the use of local transport services by tourists(Page, 1999). However, tourism planners seldom have asignicant inuence on public transport planning, whichtends to be founded on local population densities and

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 141 548 4801; fax: +44 141 552 2870.E-mail addresses: karen.thompson@strath.ac.uk (K. Thompson),

p.schoeld@salford.ac.uk (P. Schoeld).1 Tel.: +44 161 295 4579; fax: +44 161 295 2020.

Journal of Transport Geographyity provision of urban public transport, there has so farbeen limited attention to the attitudes and experiences ofvisitors to urban destinations with regard to public trans-port provision. Within the tourism literature, there hasbeen some recognition of the inuence of public transport,in terms of its availability and suitability for use by visitors,on both the visitor experience of a destination and its per-ceived attractiveness. Laws (1995), writing on the attrac-tiveness of a tourist area, identied transport as one ofthe secondary destination features which contribute to

provision of touristic goods and services can strengthencompetitive advantage (Suh and Gartner, 2004). Indeedfor former industrial cities, which have sought to use tour-ism as a tool for regeneration, the absence of conventional,heritage-based tourism resources potentially renders theprovision of excellence in other elements of the tourismproduct more important. Where the goal of urban tourismplanning is to foster greater dispersal of the benets oftourism throughout the city, the role of the transport net-work may indeed be critical (Evans and Shaw, 2002).on destination satisfaction. 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Public transport; Destination satisfaction; Performance measurement; Urban tourism; Service quality

1. Introduction

Studies of urban public transport service quality andperformance from the passenger perspective typically focuson the attitudes of local users regarding the adequacy ofexisting public transport provision. Whilst these studies

repeatedly identied as one of the key elements of the over-all tourism product at a destination (Jansen-Verbeke, 1986,1988; Gunn, 1988; Middleton, 1998; Page, 2004).

Thus, the urban tourism product is made up of a rangeof goods and services, of which transport is one, and whichtogether form the visitor experience. Where an urbanAn investigation of the retransport performance an

Karen Thompson a

a Department of Hospitality and Tourism Managemb Management and Management Sciences Research

Abstract

The availability and perceived quality of local transport at tourion visitor experience, overall satisfaction and repeat visitation. Thevisitors to evaluate quality and their relative contribution to overal0966-6923/$ - see front matter 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2006.11.004tionship between publicdestination satisfaction

Peter Schoeld b,1

University of Strathclyde, Glasgow GL4 0LG, UK

titute, University of Salford, Salford M6 6PU, UK

estinations has latterly been established as exercising an inuencemensions of urban public transport performance used by overseasstination satisfaction are investigated by this paper for the case of

www.elsevier.com/locate/jtrangeo

15 (2007) 136144

choice, image and tourist satisfaction, namely attractions,facilities, infrastructure, hospitality and cost. Within theseve categories, Kozak and Rimmington (1998) note that

Transport Geography 15 (2007) 136144 137needs rather than visitor numbers and requirements, otherthan where a high ratio of visitors to residents is the normor in the case of large scale events. Urban public transportsystems may therefore not be ideal for visitor use in termsof their frequency and route coverage (Law, 2002). Orbasliand Shaw (2004) stress that local transport needs shouldindeed take precedence over tourist needs, however theyconcede that consideration of the transportation require-ments of visitors to the city requires further attention.

2. Transport and destination satisfaction

Page (1999) bemoans the lack of understanding of therelationship between tourism and transport within the con-text of the tourist experience. Notwithstanding the lack ofdetailed research in this area, the role of internal accessibil-ity in destination quality is increasingly being accepted (e.g.ETC, 2001). Further, the contribution of transport, as asecondary destination feature, to destination image andvisitor satisfaction is a subject which has been commentedon within the scope of wider studies of the destinationexperience. Vetter (1985), for example, in an early studyof the attributes of urban destinations which render themattractive to visitors, listed the adequacy of the transportsystem as one of ten aspects of cities which are extremelyimportant to tourists, claiming that the adequacy of a citystransport system contributes to its attractiveness and over-all image. Although not based on any empirical researchand lacking a denition of what constitutes the transportsystem, his view was supported by Haywood and Muller(1988, p. 456) who concluded, after a review of criteriafor touristic attractiveness and city liveability measures,that ease of nding and reaching places within the citywas a salient attribute of visitors assessment of the qualityof the urban tourism experience.

The ability of tourist dedicated transport, as dened byHall (1999), to add to the attraction and enjoyment of adestination is evident, since this type of transport is oftenintended as an attraction and consumed by the touristfor its own sake. Examples include such forms of transportas steam railways and open top bus tours. Indeed, variousauthors have drawn attention to the ways in which trans-port can become an enjoyable feature of the tourist experi-ence, citing such examples as water buses and boat trips(Law, 2002) and heritage forms of transport Pearce(2001). However, detailed investigation of how transportwhich is not dedicated to tourist use inuences the touristexperience remains limited.

Visitor experiences at destinations and their overall satis-faction levels are routinely measured using structured meth-ods such as attribute-based models, which measure theimportance and/or performance of a range of tangible andintangible elements of the tourism product at a destination.Kozak and Rimmington (1998) note that, whilst there is nodenitive list of the attributes that contribute to destination

K. Thompson, P. Schoeld / Journal ofattractiveness, they can be classied into ve subheadingson the basis of previous literature reviews of destinationtransport related attributes typically include those relatingto transportation costs and transport nodes such as airportsand bus stations. But it is beyond the scope of destinationsatisfaction studies to investigate the detail of public trans-port performance from the visitor perspective, in terms ofthe relevant constituent dimensions and attributes.

Nonetheless, several recent studies have found theavailability and performance of transport to be a salientattribute of overall destination satisfaction and/or destina-tion choice, using a range of methods. In comparing theeectiveness of qualitative and quantitative techniques ofmeasuring the importance and performance of a range ofdestination attributes, Pritchard and Havitz (2006) foundthat, for the case of Western Australia, transportationwas the second most important, yet the most poorlyperceived in terms of performance of the 13 attributesmeasured.2 Danaher and Arweiler (1996), meanwhile,measured tourists perceptions of the performance of trans-port modes within New Zealand, including plane, publicbus, train, bus tours and hire car, concluding, on the basisof a principal components regression analysis, that overallsatisfaction with transportation did not have a signicantimpact on overall destination satisfaction or likelihood ofrecommending New Zealand as a destination. However,satisfaction with transport was not measured on the basisof transport attributes, but of overall satisfaction with eachmode used. A further nding indicated that satisfactionwith bus and rental car modes had the strongest relation-ship with over-all satisfaction with transportation. SinceDanaher and Arweilers (1996) work was conducted atcountry level, however, it reects visitor attitudes to longerdistance, as well as local transport.

Weiermair and Fuchs (1999) employed linear regressionand Sirgys congruity model of customer satisfaction/dis-satisfaction to conrm the existence of a linear relationshipbetween an overall measure of destination quality at alpineski resorts and the partial judgments of the quality of anumber of tourist activity domains, of which transportationcounted as one. However, satisfaction with both internaland external accessibility was measured as part of this trans-portation activity domain (Weiermair and Fuchs, 1999)and, whereas for the majority of other tourism activitydomains either method yielded the same ranking, for thetransportation activity domain, rankings diverged for eachof the methods, an anomaly which the authors do notelucidate. A later study of UK tourists visiting Majorcaand Turkey by Kozak (2001a) equally found transport torepresent a key underlying dimension of destination satis-faction, in as much as the perception of its quality aected

2 The 13 attributes measured were food & restaurants, accommodation,transportation, shopping, recreation, tourist information, ora and fauna,

natural scenery, local people, historic sites, local amenities, culturalactivities and weather.

Trathe overall experience of the destination. Principal compo-nents analysis on a list of attributes representing likes anddislikes and reasons for visiting coastal destinations foundthat the quality of local transportation services and destina-tion airport services accounted for two of eight factorsdelineated in the case of both destinations. Whilst theyfailed to establish, through stepwise regression, that eitherof these factors on their own was a signicant indicator ofintention to revisit the same destination, they did nd thatthe availability of these transport services had a signicantinuence on intention to revisit other destinations in thesame country. Moreover, Kozak (2002) also found statisti-cally signicant dierences in levels of satisfaction with localtransport services between visitors to Majorca and Turkeyto be greater than on any of the other seven factors. How-ever, it should be noted that Kozak (2001a) establishedoverall satisfaction with the holiday experience to be thestrongest predictor of likelihood of revisiting both the samedestination, and other destinations within the same country,and it is the role of transport within this overall level of sat-isfaction with which this paper is concerned.

In the case of urban destinations, Avgoustis and Ach-anca (2002) found the availability of local transportationservices to be rated fourth in importance for visitors toIndianapolis, out of fourteen attributes used to measuredestination satisfaction. Moreover, the same study identi-ed local transportation services as one of four attributeswhich possessed an above average ability to inuence des-tination choice. The performance of transport related attri-butes such as ease of getting around the city, andaccessibility of the city have also been measured in otherstudies of urban destination satisfaction (Bakucz, 2002;Freytag, 2002). Indeed Qu and Li (1997) went into furtherdetail by measuring satisfaction levels of mainland Chinesevisitors to Hong Kong with a number of aspects of publictransportation including variety of choices, convenience,cleanliness, comfort and eciency and cost.

Whilst the above studies have provided some evidencethat local transport is a contributing factor to destinationsatisfaction, none have attempted to investigate in detailthe specic attributes and dimensions of public transportperformance which inuence visitor satisfaction levels withthe destination, and the relative inuence of these dimen-sions on overall satisfaction with the destination. There istherefore clear scope for further work in this area, towardswhich end, it is rst of all necessary to identify the attri-butes of public transport which are recognised to constitutetransport quality and are regularly used in the measure-ment of urban public transport performance.

3. Measuring public transport performance

Whilst the internal quality of a public transport servicecan be measured on the basis of whether hard performancetargets, often set by the service provider, have been met, a

138 K. Thompson, P. Schoeld / Journal ofmeasure of true quality relies on eliciting customer per-ceptions of the performance of the service and is consideredmore dicult to measure (Kordupleski et al., 1993; Slivaand Stewart-David, 2002). A further distinction betweenhard and soft attributes of transport quality is madeby Harrison et al. (1998, p. 225) who dene hard qualityattributes as those which are more readily quantiable(e.g. access time) and soft elements as non-journey timeattributes such as information provision, sta attitudeand vehicle comfort. Thus, in a similar way to destinationsatisfaction, public transport performance is frequentlymeasured on the basis of passengers perceptions of a num-ber of attributes of the service. Pullen (1991) concluded,after extensively reviewing the literature on measuring pub-lic transport performance, that there was a distinct lack ofstandardisation in the denition of the attributes whichcomprise public transport performance, and argued forimproved denition and clarication of these attributes.The lack of clarity may be partly attributed to the fact thatmuch, although by no means all, investigation into publictransport performance is conducted under contract topublic transport operators and therefore lies outwith bothpublic and academic domains. Ongoing debate over therelationship between perceived performance, customer sat-isfaction and service quality further obscures the picture.Indeed Hensher et al. (2003) describe the identication ofthe dimensions of public transport service quality as per-ceived by passengers as one of the key challenges of mea-suring service quality.

Useful information on the attributes of public transportperformance regularly employed by transport operators inmeasuring the true quality of public transport can befound in the reports of two major European projects onpublic transport benchmarking which produced lists ofinternal and true quality indicators for urban public trans-port (Quattro, 1998; Equip, 2000). However, both of theseprojects have focussed on performance attributes deter-mined by public transport operators, rather than fromthe consumer perspective. Latterly, though, a number ofstudies of public transport quality have taken a more bot-tom-up, customer oriented approach to scrutinising theperformance attributes that contribute to customers satis-faction with public transport. These studies are of particu-lar relevance to the current study and a review thereforefollows below. It should be noted that, whilst some of thestudies focus on the public transport network in general,others concentrate on only one mode of public transport.

The work of Swanson et al. (1997) used protocol analy-sis to establish the factors of importance to travellers dur-ing bus journeys, the improvement of which would makethe service more attractive to both users and non-users.A total of thirty performance attributes were organisedinto eight stages of the bus journey and included tangibleattributes such as cleanliness and design of vehicles andshelters, as well as intangible attributes such as the helpful-ness of the driver. A monetary valuation was calculated foreach attribute using stated preference techniques. The

nsport Geography 15 (2007) 136144resulting valuations show that the attributes of publictransport for which customers would be most willing to

Trapay were information at the bus stop and clean stops andvehicles. By contrast, reducing journey time was not a highpriority for bus users.

A later study, Prioni and Hensher (2000) summarisedbus performance attributes employed in a series of previousstudies (Hensher, 1991; Brewer and Hensher, 1997; Swan-son et al., 1997) and organised these into six quality dimen-sions relating to aspects of the journey: accessing the busstop, wait time, trip, vehicle, driver and information. Prioniand Hensher (2000) attempted to quantify bus travellerspreferences for dierent levels of performance usingrevealed preference and stated preference techniques, inorder to identify the contribution of each performance attri-bute to overall quality of service. Their ndings suggest, incontrast to Swanson et al. (1997), that bus stop infrastruc-ture does not have an important inuence on quality of ser-vice. Developing their work further, Hensher et al. (2003)shed greater light on the importance of attributes of busperformance in creating satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Tra-vel time and fare were found to have the greatest inuenceon negative satisfaction, whereas frequency and ease of get-ting a seat were found to be the greatest sources of positivesatisfaction. Whilst results diered across geographic busservice segments, cleanliness and driver friendliness werefound to have limited relevance across all segments; theirsuitability as performance attributes in measuring servicequality is therefore questioned by the authors.

A further study of interest used a distinctive approach,arguing that negative critical incidents have a greaterimpact on customer perceptions of service quality thanpositive critical incidents and therefore attempting to iden-tify performance attributes through passenger complaints(Friman et al., 1998). Negative critical incidents were foundto fall into seven categories, consistent across three dier-ent critical incident techniques: treatment and action, punc-tuality, information, technical malfunction, vehicle designand space, transport planning and other. Friman et al.(1998) note that the large majority of complaints pertainedto customers treatment by sta and sta response to neg-ative critical incidents. The most important dimensions ofpublic transport quality were found to be employee behav-iour, reliability (e.g. punctuality) and simplicity (informa-tion). In a later study, a fourth dimension relating tocomfort, security and cleanliness (labelled design) wassubstantiated (Friman et al., 2001).

The above review has established a number of salientattributes and dimensions of public transport performance,quality and satisfaction which provide an insight into howoverseas visitors may measure public transport perfor-mance. In addition to the key attributes of travel time andfare, attributes pertaining to customer care, reliability (espe-cially punctuality), information provision, cleanliness, com-fort and security are also conrmed as being importantmeasures of performance. However, the studies measuringpublic transport performance have not adequately distin-

K. Thompson, P. Schoeld / Journal ofguished between frequent and infrequent users or businessand leisure users and it therefore remains unclear, whetheroverseas visitors might be aected by personal and/or exter-nal factors, such as language diculties or lack of localknowledge, whichmay lead them to engage dierent or addi-tional performance attributes. Findings from a study byPaine et al. (1969) support the hypothesis that leisure andbusiness users of public transport rate quality attributes dif-ferently on their importance, if not their performance. Hen-sher et al.s (2003) nding that travel timemakes a signicantcontribution to negative satisfaction, may be less likely toapply to the leisure visitor, for whom travel time may be aless signicant attribute of a satisfactory journey than theability to engage in sightseeing during the trip. Moreover,the accessibility of the urban tourism product potentiallyacquires a high level of signicance in the measurement oftransport performance. Visitors may place a particularlyhigh value on knowledgeable transport employees who arenot only familiar with the route, but can also advise on con-nections to other modes of transport and access to visitorattractions. Theymay thus experience higher levels of dissat-isfaction both with public transport and the destinationwhere this minimum requirement is not present.

Performance measurement has been the subject of con-siderable debate in terms of the comparative analysis ofmodels using expectations-performance, importance-performance and performance-only visitor satisfactionconstructs (Kozak, 2001b). The intuitive appeal andwidespread use of the (dis)conrmation approach i.e. theexpectations-performance construct and the diagnosticvalue of the importance-performance design notwith-standing, the performance-only model represents thewinning ticket with respect to predictive validity. A num-ber of studies on camp sites (Dorfman, 1979; Fick andRitchie, 1991), events (Crompton and Love, 1995), restau-rants (Yuksel and Rimmington, 1998) and visitor destina-tions (Fallon and Schoeld, 2004) have demonstrated thesuperiority of the performance-only conceptualisationover the other models. The performance-only model wastherefore used to examine overseas visitors perceptionsof urban public transport quality and the contribution ofrelevant performance dimensions to their overall satisfac-tion with the destination. Thus, the two key objectives ofthe paper were:

1. to identify the salient dimensions of public transportperformance from the perspective of overseas visitors;and

2. to identify which dimensions of public transport perfor-mance, if any, have a predictive eect on destinationsatisfaction.

4. Methodology

4.1. Measurement instrument

nsport Geography 15 (2007) 136144 139Whilst the transport literature discussed in Section 3above allowed the identication of a core list of attributes

Traused to measure public transport performance, the absenceof prior research specically involving overseas visitors, oron the use of public transport for leisure purposes arguedfor an initial qualitative phase to the research. Semi-struc-tured interview techniques were therefore employed withan opportunistic sample of respondents in order to estab-lish the performance factors which overseas visitors useto measure satisfaction with urban public transport. Over-seas respondents were interviewed about their transportexperiences within the region served by Greater Manches-ter Passenger Transport Executive. In the hope of increas-ing the generalisabilty of the model across urbandestinations, UK respondents were also asked to conveytheir public transport experiences at an urban destinationfrom which they had just returned. The resulting issueswere developed into statements within multiple-item scalesincluding, inter alia, a set of performance attributes onwhich the quality of urban public transport is thought tobe evaluated by overseas visitors. Whilst there was overlapbetween this set of performance attributes, and those iden-tied in the review of literature on measuring public trans-port performance, some attributes emerged which wereclearly specic to visitors, such as the ease of access of vis-itor attractions by public transport. Three items wereincluded relating to the ease, cost and safety of parkingin Manchester, partly because they had emerged stronglyfrom the interviews as items aecting modal choice andtransport satisfaction, but also for control purposes.

The questionnaire was rened further by piloting on agroup of overseas students taking a summer course in Eng-lish as a foreign language at a UK University. A substan-tial number of changes were made to the questionnaire asa result of the pilot study. Crucially, the questionnairehad to be reduced in length. In addition, diculties experi-enced by the pilot cohort in completing the questionnairewere noted and a number of aspects (mainly vocabularyitems) were changed as a result. Modications were madeto areas where there was a high rate of non-completion.A subsequent, larger scale, self-complete, questionnairesurvey of overseas visitors to Greater Manchester was con-ducted on a random intercept basis at a purposive sampleof tourist sites throughout Greater Manchester, chosen torepresent a range of distances from the city centre and lev-els of accessibility by public transport modes. Due to thelow number of visitors from overseas and a high level ofcooperation from sta at the sample sites, it was possibleto target all overseas visitors to the sites over period ofthe survey, which corresponded with the peak summer vis-itation period. Respondents were asked, inter alia, to com-ment on the performance of the eighteen performanceattributes elicited from the interview data. Responses weremeasured on a 7-point Likert scale with seven indicatingthe highest level of agreement with the statements on theperformance of Greater Manchesters public transport.Subjects overall satisfaction with the three modes of public

140 K. Thompson, P. Schoeld / Journal oftransport operating in Manchester (bus, train and Metro-link lightrail) and the destination were also measured on7-point Likert scales. All seven items on each scale wereclearly labelled and numbered to increase the validity andreliability of the instrument.

4.2. Demographic characteristics of sample

A total of 280 responses were obtained from overseasleisure visitors to Manchester over a period of severalweeks across a number of survey sites. Fifty six percentof respondents were male and 44% female, with the major-ity of respondents (73%) being under 35 years old, a gurenot unrepresentative of Manchesters visitor market, byvirtue of its vibrant night-time entertainment. Studentswere the largest single group in the distribution of respon-dents according to occupation and Spanish visitors werebetter represented than any other nationality, accountingfor 20% of those sampled.

4.3. Analysis

The data were analysed using SPSS Version 13.0. Thedistribution of the continuous variables having been rigor-ously explored, a factor analysis, was conducted using prin-cipal components as the method of extraction, with obliquerotation, with aim of reducing the items to a set of delin-eated dimensions of public transport performance. Princi-pal components analysis was selected as an appropriatestrategy where there are no a priori hypotheses about thecomponents (factors) and as a useful exploratory methodof revealing the probable number and nature of factorsin the set of variables (Tabachnik and Fidell, 1996). Allfactors with eigenvalues greater than or equal to 1.0 wereconsidered signicant and thus retained (Kaiser, 1974).Kaisers criterion is accurate when the sample size exceeds250 and the average communality is greater than or equalto 0.6 (Field, 2000). The determinant of the correlationmatrix (0.027), the KaiserMeyerOlkin (KMO) measureof sampling adequacy (0.71) and the Bartletts test of sphe-ricity (v2(55) = 132.18; p < 0.001), conrmed the factor-ability of the correlation matrix. The minimum coecientfor factor items to be included in the nal scale was 0.40as recommended by Stevens (1994) for the sample size. Areliability coecient (Cronbachs alpha) was calculatedfor each factor to estimate the reliability of each extracteddimension. Stepwise multiple regression analysis wascarried out to establish the predictive ability of the factorsover the variable measuring overall destination satisfac-tion.

5. Findings

5.1. Use of modes of transport

The vast majority of overseas visitors to Greater Man-chester (87%) had arrived in the UK by air with only 3%

nsport Geography 15 (2007) 136144of visitors arriving by car. When asked whether they hada car at their disposal during their stay in Greater Man-

Trachester, 75.2% of respondents said no. Thus, three quartersof the respondents could be classied as captive publictransport users (Hovell et al., 1975). Respondents were fur-ther asked to provide information on the modes of trans-port they had used during their stay in GreaterManchester. More respondents had used the bus thanany other form of transport (29%). All of the modes ofpublic transport (bus, train and tram) had been used bymore respondents than private modes (car and coach).These gures, illustrated in Table 1, conrm the impor-tance of public transport for overseas visitors travellingaround Manchester.

5.2. Performance dimensions

Data reduction techniques were employed to explore theunderlying dimensions of the 18 performance attributes.Two items, parking in Manchester is expensive and someareas of Manchester which I would like to travel to are dif-cult to reach were deleted because of their low correla-tions (0.95) indicated the absence of collinearity inthe data. In addition, the predictors were found to havemost of their variance loading onto dierent dimensions(eigenvalues).

The results of the regression analysis are given in Table3. The R value of independent variables on the dependentvariable (0.21) shows that destination satisfaction is onlyweakly inuenced by the factors; the value of adjusted R2

is small according to Cohens (1988) benchmarks and sug-gests that they account for only 4.5% of the variability indestination satisfaction. The shrinkage between the R2

and the adjusted R2 values is 0.01, indicating that if themodel were derived from the population rather than thesample, it would account for approximately 1.0% less var-iance in the outcome. The F ratio value (4.333) is signicant(p < 0.005) indicating that the beta coecients can be usedto explain each of the factors relative contribution to thevariance in destination satisfaction, although only factor1 (ease of use) makes a signicant contribution to theprediction of destination satisfaction (t (275) = 2.97,p = 0.003) and this accounts for only a small amount ofthe variance in destination satisfaction. For a one unitincrease in public transports ease of use, destination sat-isfaction increases by only 0.18 units.

nsport Geography 15 (2007) 136144 141The assumptions of regression analysis were not metfor the variable overall destination satisfaction and the

Factor 1: Ease of use

por

TraPublic transport in Manchester is easy to useI am able to nd the information I need to make journeys by public transAny problems or questions I had were dealt with eectivelyIt is easy to buy the right ticket for your journeyPublic transport sta are helpful

Factor 2: Eciency and safety

Public transport in Manchester is a fast way to travelPublic transport in Manchester arrives on timePublic transport vehicles in Manchester are safeI would feel safe travelling alone on public transport in Manchester

Factor 3: Good parking

It is easy to park your car in ManchesterMy car is safe when parked in Manchester

EigenvalueVariance (%)Cumulative variance (%)Cronbachs alphaTable 2Dimensions of public transport performance

142 K. Thompson, P. Schoeld / Journal ofmeasures of satisfaction with the three separate modes ofpublic transport (bus, tram and train). This was due tothe limited number of valid cases and moderate correla-tions between the predictor variables. However, calculationof the R2 values indicated that 35% of the variability inoverall destination satisfaction can be explained by satis-faction with the train, whereas satisfaction with tram andbus explain 29% and 17% respectively of the variability inoverall destination satisfaction. It is notable that, whilstsatisfaction with the train explained the highest percentof the variability in overall destination satisfaction of thethree modes, it was the mode with which respondents were,on average, least satised x 4:58; s 1:60 and wasthe least likely to be used on future visits to the cityx 5:31; s 1:42.

6. Discussion and conclusions

A number of similarities can be observed between thethree factor solution presented in Section 5.2 and the nd-ings of Friman et al. (1998). Factor 1, Ease of Use, links

Number of items (total = 11)

Table 3Regression analysis: overall satisfaction with destination

Variable Unstandardisedbeta coecient

Standardisedbetacoecient

t Signicance

Constant 5.099 78.094

of service provision in the areas of ticketing, customer ser-vice and transport information for overseas visitors to

TraManchester. With regard to individual modes, although ahigher percentage of overseas visitors use the bus thanany other mode, destination satisfaction levels are less clo-sely correlated with bus satisfaction, than with satisfactionwith other modes, possibly as a result of lower expectationsin relation to bus travel. It is therefore suggested that Man-chesters rail and Metrolink systems should be the mainfocus of any specic eorts to tailor public transport tooverseas visitors use in Manchester.

The paper has highlighted a number of key issues in theprovision of public transport for overseas visitors to a spe-cic urban destination. The small but signicant role ofpublic transport performance as a predictor of satisfactionwith Destination Manchester has been established using anattribute based model and statistical techniques common toboth transport and tourism research. Evidence of a linkbetween satisfaction with urban public transport and desti-nation satisfaction, hypothesised within the tourism litera-ture, has been strengthened. Moreover, the study hasconrmed the usefulness of attribute based measurementtechniques from the marketing and tourist behaviour liter-atures to the study of public transport SQ. Domestic visi-tors were excluded from this study on the basis that theywould perceive attributes of public transport performancein a more similar way to local users. Future research shouldtarget domestic visitors in order to test the accuracy of thishypothesis and determine whether the measurement modelis applicable in other contexts. There is also scope for moredetailed investigation of the link between private transportand the visitor experience, which has been largely over-looked by this study.

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An investigation of the relationship between public transport performance and destination satisfactionIntroductionTransport and destination satisfactionMeasuring public transport performanceMethodologyMeasurement instrumentDemographic characteristics of sampleAnalysis

FindingsUse of modes of transportPerformance dimensionsPredictive effect on destination satisfaction

Discussion and conclusionsReferences