Journal of Xi'an University of Architecture & Technology Issn No : 1006-7930

Impact of Five A’s of Tourism on Tourist Loyalty in Tamil Nadu

Tourism with reference to Coimbatore City
Dr.S.Ramesh, Associate Professor, School of Commerce and Management Studies, Jain
(Deemed-to-be University), Bengaluru
Mobile: 98409-24994, Email: rameshvijayalayan2002@gmail.com
Dr.S.Muralidhar, Assistant Professor, School of Commerce and Management Studies, Jain
(Deemed-to-be University), Bengaluru
Mobile: 80120-10506, Email: smurali53@gmail.com

Abstract

The dimension of loyalty is a topic of boundless attention for the marketing academic literature.
The relation that loyalty has with the results of establishments has been tested by several studies
and the search to hold gainful customers has become a maxim in stable management. Tourist
destinations have not remained insensible to this inclination. However, the difficulty involved
in determining the loyalty of a tourist destination is a brake on its acceptance by those in charge
of destination management. The expediency of measuring loyalty lies in being able to apply
approaches which enable improving it, but that also impact on the enrichment of the
organization's results. India is mostly a cultural destination not only in global tourism but in
national tourism also. Tourism is also budding as an industry in India. In recent years an
outstanding growth in tourism is observed in India; inbound as well as outbound. In the existing
study, we examined the influence of destination image on tourist loyalty and intension to visit
to Coimbatore city. Furthermore, the study focused on the mediation of 5 A’s of tourism and
tourist satisfaction on these associations. The data were obtained from a survey supported out
with 980 tourists of the city of Coimbatore. The study's key contribution stems from the
opportunity of simply measuring loyalty and from establishing 5 A’s of tourism for which
marketing strategies of distinguished relations can be put into rehearsal and that contribute to
the enhancement of the destination's results. The study reveals that the tourists were paying
highest importance to Accommodation and Attractions to prefer visiting the place again and
also recommend that place to others.

Key words: Destinations, Accommodation, Accessibility, Activities, Amenities, Attractions,

Loyalty

1. Introduction

Tourism has further prolonged and has become a more influential industry in the world, which
highly impacts the economy of a country. Also, it is connected with several other sectors, such
as advertising, endorsements, product placements, sponsorships, and commercial
organizations. The tourism industry has twisted an actual transformation for millions of
people’s lives by pouring development or growth, generating massive revenue, creating various
jobs, and dipping poverty among nations across the regional and universal borders.

Loyalty toward the destination is important due to the role that it plays in obtaining profitability
(Yoo & Bai, 2013) and in its subsequent growth and development. This characteristic, common
to firms and destinations, is even more relevant in the case of the latter. This is because of the

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effect that tourism has on economic growth, employment and the welfare of citizens, especially
in economies strongly linked to the tourist sector. Therefore, the measurement of loyalty should
be accompanied by the quantification of the effect of this loyalty toward the destination on
some variable of profitability or growth.

The 5 A’s of tourism are the reasons that express the understanding of a tourist when he travels
away. They were defined by Dickman in 1997. Travel management experts understand that
there has to be a healthy balance between all 5 A’s in order for the tourist to have a good
experience. The 5 A’s are: (1) Accommodation (2) Accessibility (3) Activities (4) Amenities
(5) Attractions

Accommodation – Effective accommodation development, more than even before, depends

on building the accurate type of ability to suit the needs of a gainful segment of the market.
Place to stay or accommodate while travelling for break or overnight stays. Accommodation is
the basic necessity of activity. Lacking accommodation, it will be difficult to develop tourism
even in the attractive places in the world

Accessibility – Access is the theme of conveyance infrastructure and transport technology. It

is how to access or reach to that place of desirability. Ways to reach.

Activities – Attractions are often reinforced by a range of activities. It contains activities which
a place or attraction grasps such as nature walks, history &architecture, boating, views, health,
etc.

Amenities- Amenities are purpose-built around the needs and wants of the potential visitors
from targeted segments in numbers identified by market viability studies. All the other services,
which we need while travelling for good and comfortable living while travel such as food,
drinking water, sanitary, etc. It refers to the facilities provided in the destination places and as
a tourism is a service industry, an appropriate, attractive and well- facilitated services should
be provided to the tourist.

Attractions - Attractions comprise natural attractions, built attractions, cultural attractions, and
social attractions. It consists of all those factors which appeal a tourist. It could be a place,
nature, lakes, beach, monuments etc. It is a place of interest where the tourist visit, typically
for its intrinsic or revealed natural or cultural value, historical significance, natural or built
beauty, offering leisure, adventure, amusement and medical services for aging travelers.

These components are essential for a tourist place to attract the interest of visitors and to induce
them to visit the place again. Therefore, the researchers wanted to study the extent of influence
of these components on the loyalty of visitors to a tourist place. This study was devoted on
this aspect with an objective of determining the order of impact of 5 A’s of tourism on the
loyalty of visitors.

2. Literature Review

According to Firoozbakht et al., (2014) Customer loyalty has two meanings: long-term and
short-term loyalty. Customers with long-term loyalty do not easily switch to other service
providers, while customers with short-term loyalty defect more easily when offered a perceived
better alternative. The results of the research show the positive effect of the abovementioned
variables on loyalty. To make use of the standards of quality known to everyone and to

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constantly assess the frequency of their usage: Now-a-days, the role of the quality of the
services in gaining the customer satisfaction is known to everyone. The higher quality the
services enjoy, the more will be the customer satisfaction and thus their loyalty to the
organization. To achieve this important factor, it is essential to constantly assess the quality of
the services. The staffs need to be trained to be able to communicate properly and efficiently
with the customers. The organization needs to consult different experts and improve the staff’s
abilities in communicating with customers by having academic seminars related to this field.

Ivanauskienė and Volungėnaitė (2014) investigated the relationship between service quality
and customer loyalty across three emerging countries. The aim of this study is twofold one is
to evaluate the applicability of RSQS instrument in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia household
retail sector and to examine the relationship between retail service quality dimensions and
customer loyalty. The study findings indicate that the dimensions of retail service quality in a
specific sector of the industry are different in emerging markets compared to those that are in
the original measurement scale such as RSQS. The study revealed that the three dimensions
of service quality, namely, personal interaction, policy and product quality have a positive
impact on customer loyalty across household retail markets in the three researched countries.
It is especially important in household sector, as customers are buying products that are of high
price they expect to get the product on time and with high value.

Tourism cannot sustain without customer loyalty, this factor is most important (Reid and Reid,
1993). The current choice in area this is evaluated in context of an industry. The elaboration
its evaluation, its dimension focus on the issues involved in modern social marketing strategies
and their prospect in the field of tourism has to be considered. The issues of market failure and
public choice has to be a highlighted in the context of a global economic environment
economically and as essential for competition. Customer loyalty has one great benefit, it is easy
to please a current visitor than seek new visitor each time. The loyal customer is also the best
publicist; he indulges in word of mouth advertising which does not as cost the service provider
much. The loyal customer must begiven attractive discount. They are easier to handle as they
help form records and also become targets for indirect marketing. The service provider can
segment and solicit responses from them for their promotional target

Loyalty has been restrained in one of the following ways: (i) the behavioral approach (Backman
& Crompton, 1991; Chaudhuri & Holbrook, 2001; Yoon& Uysal, 2005; Kabiraj & Shanmugan,
2011; Iordanova, 2016), (ii) the attitudinal approach (Backman và Crompton, 1991; Chaudhuri
& Holbrook, 2001; Yoon& Uysal, 2005; Kabiraj & Shanmugan, 2011; Iordanova, 2016, and
(iii) the composite approach (Backman & Crompton, 1991; Yoon & Uysal, 2005;Iordanova,
2016).

The behavioral approach opinions customer loyalty as a behavior which is operationalized in

relationships with repeat purchases, or purchase regularity, or segment of purchase (Backman
& Crompton, 1991; Yoon & Uysal, 2005; Iordanova, 2016; Chaudhuri & Holbrook, 2001;
Kabiraj & Shanmugan, 2011). The attitudinal approach, based on consumer product
preferences or purpose to buy, consumer loyalty is an challenge on the part of consumers to go
elsewhere explicit behavior and prompt their loyalty in terms of emotional commitment or
statement of preference(Backman & Crompton, 1991; Chaudhuri & Holbrook, 2001; Yoon&
Uysal, 2005; Kabiraj & Shanmugan,2011; Iordanova, 2016). Lastly, the composite or
combination approach is a mixing of the behavioral and attitudinal approaches (Backman &
Crompton, 1991; Yoon& Uysal, 2005; Iordanova, 2016). It has been claimed that customers

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who buys and have loyalty to specific brands must have an optimistic attitude toward those
brands (Yoon& Uysal, 2005).

On the other indicator, the concept of destination brand was defined by the authors Ritchie and
Ritchie (1998 cited in Almeyda-Ibanez and Babu, 2017) as "[...] a name, symbol, logo or any
graphic sign that recognizes and differentiates the destination; moreover, it represents the
promise of a unforgettable travel experience that is distinctively associated with the
destination”. The promise the brand bargains is even more important for a tourist destination,
as it offers some ease to tourists when they choose to visit a destination, anticipating to some
extent the experience they will have (Blain, Levyand Ritchie, 2005).The purpose to coming
back to the destination is measured to be a key element of loyalty and many authors have gone
systematically into this perception, trying to fix the factors which permit achieving high values
in the possibility of reappearance (Backman and Crompton, 1991, Cronin et al., 2000, Petrick
et al., 2001). In the field of tourism there are various works which have used this pointer as a
degree of loyalty (Kim et al., 2009, Petrick, 2004, Qu et al., 2011).

4. Methodology

Descriptive research design is used for the study. It studies the state of affairs as it exists at
present. The aim of this study is to describe tourists’ loyalty towards based on various
components of tourism. The study was done with a sample size of 980 from the tourist places
of Coimbatore city on random basis. Primary data was collected through Personal interview
with a well-defined questionnaire and information was gathered during October, 2019. The
questionnaire consists of a number of questions on the various components of tourism and
tourist loyalty. The components of tourism was studied through Five A’s – Accommodation,
Accessibility, Activities, Amenities and Attractions and several statements were included
under these dimensions with a 5-point likert scaling technique on satisfaction level of tourists,
1 being highest level of satisfaction through 5 being the lowest level. The statistical tools like
Descriptive statistics and Multiple Regression Analysis was used to determine the impact of
components of tourism on the loyalty of tourists.

Domestic tourism, mentioning to "residents of a country visiting their own country" (Cocean,
Moisescu and Toader, 2014) is a vital part of tourism in Romania. The number of journeys
made by Romanians on the area of the country, whether aimed at visiting relatives and friends,
or spending holidays and vacations away from home, surpassed the number of arrivals of
foreigners in our country, according to an authorized report "Travel in Romania" written by
Euromonitor International in September 2017 (EIL, 2017). The same report mentions that
between the factors that have subsidized to the development of the domestic tourism in the last
period are the low prices of the accommodation units in Romania (largely those from rural
areas, where the expansion of agritourism is detected),\a rise in the number of domestic flights,
especially direct flights to Constanta (that favoured by granting holiday vouchers to public
sector’s employees.

5. Result and Discussions

To analyze the impact of Five A’s of Tourism such as Accommodation, Accessibility,

Activities, and Amenities on Tourist Loyalty on Tourism places in Tamil Nadu, multiple
regression analysis has been administered and based on the result, a model was constructed and
the same is exhibited through an equation. The score on Loyalty of visitors was treated as
dependent variables and the Five A’s of tourism, viz. Accommodation, Accessibility,

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Activities, and Amenities were treated as independent variables for the analysis. The fitted
regression model would be of the form:

Y = a +b1X1+ b2X2 + b3X3 + b4X4 + bX5 + e

where, b1, b2, b3, b4 and b5 are Regression co-efficient of the independent variables
a - Intercept and
X1 - Accommodation
X2 - Accessbility
X3 - Activities
X4 - Amenities
X5 - Attractions
e - Error term
The multiple regression analysis was carried with the following hypothesis.
Ho: There is no combined effect of Five A’s of Tourism on Tourist Loyalty
H1: There is a significant combined effect of Five A’s of Tourism on Tourist Loyalty

The following Table 1 gives the summary statistics of all the variables taken for study. The
mean and standard deviation for each variable is given in the table. It can be seen from the
table that the mean of Accommodation (4.632) is more than all other components of tourism,
which indicates that the tourists give more importance to good accommodation among all other
facilities. The tourists preferred Attractions as the second important component, as the mean
of the same is 4.333, followed by Accessibility, Amenities and Attractions. Also it can be
observed that the standard deviation for the component Attractions is least among all other
components, which implies the tourists are more likely behaved similarly in giving importance
to Attractions.

Table 1 : Descriptive Statistics

Variables Std.
Mean Deviation N
Tourist Loyalty 3.817 1.236 980
Accommodation 4.632 0.612 980
Accessibility 4.112 0.862 980
Activities 3.578 0.718 980
Amenities 3.965 1.028 980
Attractions 4.333 0.463 980

Table 2 gives the correlations between the dependent variable profit before tax and all other
independent variables. It is clear from the table that all the components of tourism, i.e.,
Accommodation, Accessibility, Activities, and Amenities have high positive correlations with
the dependent variable Tourist Loyalty. The component Attractions has the highest correlation

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(.890), followed by Accommodation (.860), Accessibility (.792), Amenities (.698) and

Activities (.674). Also it may be noted that there is significant low correlations among
independent variables which confirms that there is no multicollinearity among independent
variables. Hence multiple regression analysis through SPSS software by Enter method was
used to determine the effect of the independent variables on the dependent variable Tourist
Loyalty.

Table 2 Correlations

Tourist Accommo Accessibili

Variables Activities Amenities Attractions
Loyalty dation ty
Tourist Loyalty 1.000
Accommodation .860* 1.000
Accessibility .792* .498* 1.000
Activities .674* .362* .422* 1.000
Amenities .698* .512* .316* .443* 1.000
Attractions .890* .333* .286* .312* .242* 1.000
* Significant at 5% level.

Table 3 depicts the model summary of the regression model fitted by SPSS software. In the
model the R-Square is shown as 0.912, with adjusted R-square value of .895, which means 90
per cent of the variation in the dependent variable Tourist Loyalty was explained by the
independent variables, components of tourism. Also, the low value of F= 44.521 with a very
low p-value (<.01) verify that the model is the significant in explaining variations in Tourist
Loyalty.
Table 3 - Model Summary – Regression Analysis
R Adjusted Std. Error of the
Model R F statistic Sig.
Square R Square Estimate
1 .912 .895 .807 .685 44.521 .000*
* Significant at 1% level of significance

Table 4 gives the coefficients of the independent variables in the model. The fitted model for
the dependent variable Tourist Loyalty on the independent variables is expressed by the
equation:

Tourist Loyalty = 1.738 + .671 (Accommodation) + 1.213 (Accessibility)

+ .786 (Activities) + .911 (Amenities) + 1.245 (Attractions)

Table 4 Coefficients

Unstandardized Standardized
Coefficients Coefficients
Model t Sig.
Std.
B Beta
Error
1 (Constant) 1.738 .341 5.484 .000*

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Accommodation .671 .096 .718 7.020 .000*

Accessibility 1.213 .134 .563 11.637 .000*
Activities .786 .116 .402 7.431 .000*
Amenities .911 .170 .534 9.088 .000*
Attractions 1.245 .698 8.333 .000*
a. Dependent Variable: Tourist Loyalty
* Significant at 1% level of significance

It can be seen from the above table that of the independent variables are significant in
explaining variations in Tourist Loyalty (with high t-values and low p-values) at 1 per cent
level of significance. Hence the hypothesis of no combined effect of Five A’s of tourism on
Tourist Loyalty is rejected, and it is concluded that all components of tourism had a significant
impact on the loyalty of tourists in Coimbatore district. All the components have a strong
positive impact on tourist loyalty. The beta coefficient signifies the order of influence of
independent variables on the dependent variable. It is evident from the above table that the
component Accommodation (beta = .718) is the maximum influencing on Tourist Loyalty,
followed by the components Attractions (.698), Accessibility (.563), Amenities (.534), and
Activities (.402). The analysis reveals that the tourists are giving highest importance to
Accommodation and Attractions so that they can prefer to visit the place again and will
recommend that place to others also.

6. Conclusion

The study revealed several facts and findings regarding destination image, tourist satisfaction,
and influence of 5 A’s on tourist loyalty. This study donates a simple and practical dimension
of a tourist's degree of loyalty to a tourist destination towards 5 A’s of tourism. Tourist loyalty
is mostly influenced by the Attraction and Accommodation. The visitors prefer the attractions
available at the tourist destinations and also the accommodation available there. These A’s will
induce the tourist to make a revisit to the particular destination again. Therefore, it is suggested
that the tourist destination should have very good hotels for stay and also provide tasty food
apart from the best attractions such as amusement, games for all age group of visitors. The
tourist places may also include best swimming pools, water games alongside spiritual
monuments.

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7. References

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 Dickman, S. (1997). “Tourism: An Introductory Text. Holder Education, Rydalmere,
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 Iordanova, E. (2016). “Tourism destination image as an antecedent of destination
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 Kim, T., Kim, W.G. and Kim, H.B. (2009). “The Effects of Perceived Justice on
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 Kozak, M. & Rimmington, M. (1999). “Measuring tourist destination competitiveness:
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 Lee, S., Jeon, S.& Kim, D. (2011). “The impact of tour quality and tourist satisfaction
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1115 –1124
 S. Shoemaker and R.C.Lewis, “Customer loyalty: the future hospitality maketing,”
Journal of Hospitality Marketing. Vol.18 No.4. 1999

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