consideration that respondents may easily lose their patience or may be pre-occupied with other activities after the cruise.
Measurement and Data Analysis
Based on a comprehensive literature review and expert opinions from cruise managers and travel agents, 24 attributes are developed exclusively for measuring various aspects of the service quality of the cruise such as the facilities provided in the pier, cruise ship, food quality of the dinner buffet, harbour scene, entertainment and staff service. Passengers’ perception of the performance of service quality are measured by asking them to rate each service quality attribute on a satisfaction scale (1 = very dissatisfied and 5 = very satisfied). This type of measurement scale is used by researchers such as Qu and Wong (1998) and Heung et al. (2002).
The overall satisfaction and perceived value are measured by a single-item. As mentioned above, the questionnaire must be short enough to encourage response. Use of multi-item scales for overall satisfaction and perceived value will mean longer questionnaire and may affect the response rate and overall reliability. Therefore, single-item measures for these two constructs are considered adequate for this exploratory study.