A GLM approach for the customer satisfaction measurement in some bathing beaches of Messina province

In recent years, port authorities and municipalities receive a very large number of requests for release of grant of beaches. The bathing beach is a strictly summer service, it was initially created for hotels customers and was later extended to daily, weekly and monthly customers. There are many reasons for swimmers to choose the bathing establishment: the existence of amenities and services (umbrellas, chairs, snacks, drinks, entertainment, etc. ..) and the cleanliness and order in the beach. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the customer satisfaction in the bathing establishments. For this, we focused our attention on the swimmers satisfaction towards the services offered by the establishments. The survey was performed on some bathing establishments located in the Ionian coast of the Messina province in summer 2010. Data were collected on the field by the administration of a questionnaire, distributed according to the technique of cluster sampling. The questionnaire was structured into sections: an introductory registry section to obtain basic information on gender, nationality and profession of the interviewee; a section where the respondent is asked to express a personal opinion about the holiday and the reasons for the choice of bathing establishment; a section relative to the personal evaluations expressed by the indicators of interest (staff courteous and helpfulness, environment clean, toilets clean, ancillary services quality, structure accessibility, service cost) and, finally, an overall judgment on total quality assessment, expressed on five satisfaction levels. Statistical analysis was performed through the use of appropriate statistical models, to formalize the dependence of satisfaction; given the nature of the response variable, we applied the generalized linear models (GLM). In particular we estimated a Polytomous Universal Model (PLUM), to assess the possible dependence of the degree of satisfaction (expressed by bathers on an ordinal scale with five levels) on potentially predictive factors (Marija Norušis, 2009). The obtained results showed that staff courtesy and helpful, environment clean, toilets clean, ancillary services quality, structure accessibility, service cost are the most significant variables that influence the satisfaction; moreover the women also seem to be more satisfied than men.