Questionnaire Design and Measurement
A structured undisguised questionnaire was developed, containing 37 closed questions and five open questions. The questionnaire was sent by e-mail to a convenient sample of about 400 contacts on 7 May 2002, with the invitation to complete the questionnaire for at least one travel website. Links were provided to the three websites, and respondents were invited to visit and explore the sites before filling out the survey. Ninety-one respondents completed the questionnaire, 44 respondents for D-reizen, 20 respondents for De Jong Intra, and 27 respondents for Travel24. In the original SERVQUAL model, service quality is defined as the difference between customers’ expectations or anticipations and their perceptions of actual performance. It has been suggested that service quality can be measured more appropriately as performance. Service quality, measured as perceived performance, has been demonstrated to affect customer satisfaction and patronage behaviour directly and to a high degree. It was therefore decided to measure service quality as respondents’ self-reported agreement or disagreement with statements about the performance of the service on the previously discussed dimensions. Performance perceptions were measured on seven point Likert-scales.