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Abstract
This empirical study is held in the city of Kaliningrad, the westernmost region of Russia. The SERVQUAL model is applied to discover the quality gap of customers' expectations and perceptions on public transportation services. Citizens of this Russian enclave in the centre of Europe showed themselves as knowledgeable and demanding passengers, having an extensive experience in using public transport all over the world. The methodology of this study ensured the 95% confidence interval that the whole population of Kaliningrad city share the opinion of the respondents, while minimizing occasional results to just 5 percent. The research results suggest that the service environment, which includes the tangibles dimension, received the largest expectations-perceptions' gap, while outcome and process attributes are of moderate satisfaction. Although the factors within the assurance dimension also negatively influence the overall assessment of the service quality of public transportation in the city of Kaliningrad.
Keywords: SERVQUAL model, public transportation in Russia, service quality, Kaliningrad region.
1. Introduction
Public transportation services are the ones used and evaluated by millions of passengers all over the world on a daily basis. In fact, it is hard to find a person, who has never experienced public transportation in his home country or abroad. However, despite the unified principles and prevalence of this type of service worldwide, there are significant differences in the perceive quality of service provided. It is therefore an interesting research topic to discover the customers' expectations and perceptions on public transportation in the westernmost region of Russia. The article provides results of an empirical research on the quality of city bus services in Kaliningrad region of Russia that is based on customers' evaluation. The choice of the region is caused by the exceptional geographical location of the region, being an enclave of the Russian Federation in the middle of European Union. Citizens of this begirt area have extensive experience in public transportation services both in mainland Russia and abroad - mostly within the travel destinations of Europe. This fact suggests promising research results with regard to contribution in the theoretical framework of customer perceived service quality. Apart from a clear theoretical value of this study, the research on public transportation in the Kaliningrad region of Russia has an important practical implementation. Since...