A Structural Equation Model Proposal for evaluating Visitor Satisfaction at an Exhibition

The main problems in measuring visitor satisfaction in a museum context are related to the characteristics of intangible services, in the sense that visitors give only an intrinsic psychological evaluation, having made no experience of use. The concept of loyalty, in its common sense, may seldom be encountered; it is sometimes associated to the concept of intensification, usually measured through the evaluation of the consumption of extra services – like purchases of guides, publications, souvenirs or presents –, that are assumed to be related to the word of mouth and thus to the confirmation and transfer of the repurchase and revisit intention also to other people. Sampling problems may arise: unless tickets are purchased on the web, there is no database of the visitors, and when it exists it can be of little use, e.g. when visitors are tourists. The sole impressions of people filling the questionnaires are available and not all visitors may be interested before they attend the event. A kind of systematic sampling is usually adopted, which does not ensure optimality criteria, though giving a representative sample for the visitors’ population. Structural Equation Models with Latent Variables (SEM-LV) have been commonly and successfully applied to Customer Satisfaction (CS) analyses. To build a SEM-LV we have first to define a construct consisting of a net of concepts related to CS – which are classified in determinants and consequences of CS – and the causal relationships existing among the involved concepts. Here we propose a construct to evaluate the satisfaction level for an exhibition: we consider the ‘Information availability’, the ‘Impression at the visitor arrival’, the ‘Logistic aspects’, the ‘Expositive Route’ and the ‘Hall Personnel’ as exogenous latent variables, the ‘Visitor satisfaction’ and ‘Extra Services’ as endogenous ones. The parameter estimates confirm what reported in the international literature; ‘Expositive Route’ has the strongest impact on ‘Visitor satisfaction’. The observed socio-demographic variables may be useful to study the different behaviour of clusters of visitors: (e.g., it is possible to create a segmentation based on the visitor art knowledge background). Future developments will regard the purification of the scales and the possibility to include in the construct also the modern vision of the service user: he is considered a co-creator of satisfaction, an aspect assuming great importance for art connoisseurs.