A CUMULATIVE PROPORTIONAL ODDS MODEL FOR CUSTOMER SATISFACTION IN MESSINA’S BATHHOUSES

Every year, port authorities and municipalities release many permissions for opening bathhouses. The bathing beach is a strictly summer service. There are many reasons for bathers to choose the bathhouses: 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 bathers satisfaction towards the services offered by the bathhouses. The survey was performed on thirteen bathing establishments located in the Ionian and Tyrrhenian coasts of the Messina province in summer 2012. Data were collected on the field by the administration of a questionnaire, distributed according to the technique of cluster sampling. The whole sample is composed by 620 interviewed. 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 bathhouses; a section relative to the personal evaluations expressed by the interest indicators (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 by bathers on an ordinal scale with five levels. Given the nature of the response variable, we estimated a Cumulative Proportional Odds Model to assess the possible dependence of bathers satisfaction on potentially predictive factors.