Methodology
Measurement instrument for the empirical study was developed in three phases. First, some of
the relevant items for the questionnaire were taken from the relevant literature. For the
measurement of hotel quality the items from Petrick’s (2002) and adopted items from SERVPERF
scale (Cronin and Taylor 1992) were used. Items for measurement of perceived value
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and perceived price were adopted from Cronin (2000) and Gallarza and Saura (2006).
Adopted Oliver’s (1993) scale was used for measurement of customer satisfaction. Second,
in-depth interviews with 40 tourists of different gender, age, education and from different
countries were conducted in order to generate additional pool of items. Then the questionnaire
was examined by 4 specialists (3 in the field of tourism and 1 in the field of marketing
research methods) in terms of content validity and to avoid the redundancy of the questions.
In order to test for internal consistency of the scales used in the final study and to further
reduce the number of items, a pilot survey had been conducted on a sample of 616
respondents in three Slovenian tourist destinations (Ljubljana, Portorož, and Zrece). In the
final study the items for hotel quality, perceived value, and perceived price were measured on
the 5 point Likert scale (from 1 = “strongly disagree” to 5 = “strongly disagree”). 12 items
were used for measurement of hotel quality, the scale for perceived value consisted of 6
items, and the scale for perceived costs of 2 items. Satisfaction was also measured on a 5
point scale from “very dissatisfied” to “very satisfied”.
Data for the main research was collected from 1020 tourists in Slovenia (Ljubljana, Portorož,
Zrece and Rogla) in August 2007 by means of a personal interview. For each of the four
destinations, the quota sample framework followed the representative tourist structure by the
country of origin. Due to control over the respondent selection we believe that relevant units
were included.