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Introduction
Tourism is one of the sectors that has a significant impact on the economic development of a country, along with the numerous sectors it is affiliated with. This is because the tourism sector generates jobs and revenue sources. In addition, the changes and innovations in the demographic, socio-economic and technological fields in tourism are leading to greater competition among tourist destinations, which has increased significantly during recent years. Therefore, tourism managers hope that visitors will select a tourism destination, and then they will return to it and recommend it to others, so improving service quality, perceived quality and the level of tourist satisfaction is very important for tourism firms (Tian-Cole and Crompton, 2003). It is commonly believed that higher service quality can lead to an increase in customer overall satisfaction, which will subsequently lead to higher loyalty (Bigne et al. , 2001). Moreover, the impact of perceived quality on customer satisfaction has been supported by many research studies (Zabkar et al. , 2010; Chumpitaz and Swaen, 2002; Bigne et al. , 2001; Chen and Tsai, 2007; Cronin et al. , 2000; Petrick and Backman, 2002). In recent years, there have also been a number of works related to service quality, perceived quality and satisfaction in the tourism field (Zabkar et al. , 2010; Jridi et al. , 2014; Bigne et al. , 2001; Chen and Tsai, 2007).
The service sector has some special characteristics such as the focal products are intangible, and both service delivery and consumption take place at the same time, and thus consumers feel more risks when deciding to use a service. Word-of-mouth (WOM) is considered as a useful information source which can help people evaluate quality service, find out information about a service and thereby influence the intention to use it. In terms of tourism, when tourists act as reviewers to share their experiences and recommend a destination to others, the aim of tourism managers remains how to provide good quality products and services (e.g. accommodation, food and beverages, transportation, entertainment, services at sights and so on) so that tourists will positively evaluate these and feel greater satisfaction. Satisfied tourists will respond positively through a greater intention to revisit the destination or make positive WOM recommendations. However, the perceptions of...