The impacts of tour guide performance on foreign tourist satisfaction and destination loyalty in Vietnam

This research was generated through my previous career as a tour guide in Vietnam. The tourism industry has been developing over recent years in Vietnam, as will be evidenced by the literature review below. This research investigates the impact tour guides have on the satisfaction of tourists who are choosing Vietnam as a tourism destination. The following proposal outlines the case of the study in terms of history of tourism industry in Vietnam, the role of tour guide in a package tour, and the relationships between tour guide performance, foreign tourist satisfaction, and tourist’s destination loyalty in Vietnam. In the literature on tourism studies, significant attention has been paid to tourist satisfaction that depended on various factors, but relatively little attention has been paid to the effect of tour guide performance on both tourists’ satisfaction and their destination loyalty. Even less research has been conducted on the role of the tour guide in a package tour. Tour guides are frontline employees in the tourism industry who play a significant role in drawing tourists to a destination. Tour guiding service is the principal component of tour services. Whether tour guides can deliver quality service to tourists is not only essential to the business success of the company, but also significant to the image of the destination (Huang et al., 2010). Although previous research looked at the factors of tour guide performance on the experience of tourists in package tour, there is disagreement about the impact of tour guide performance on tourist satisfaction. Destination loyalty of tourist also needs to be investigated from the tour guide performance and tourist satisfaction perspectives, in order to provide a more complete understanding of the role of the tour guide in a package tour. This research, therefore, attempts to bridge these gaps by exploring the attributes of tour guide performance from the foreign tourist’s perspective. The study was conducted in the context of the foreign tourists who are in Vietnam to evaluate domestic tour guide performance. This context was chosen on the basis that there has been no research conducted on tour guide performance in the Vietnamese context. A self-administrated questionnaire was developed based on the review of the relevant literature and focus group interviews, and was administered to a sample of 500 foreign tourists in six big cities that attract many foreign tourists in Vietnam. Tour guides were recruited for data collection in every tour held by tourism companies. Tour guides distributed the questionnaires to the tourists on the last night of the package tour and then collected them on the next morning. The tour guide, in addition, also informed the tourists that only the researcher would see the returned questionnaires that they put in a sealed envelope. Additionally, I and my colleagues also travelled to the places that attract many foreign tourists; handed the questionnaires to them; let them have approximately 10 minutes to answer; and finally collected the questionnaires again. Following a pilot study testing the survey instrument, the main data collection phase resulted in 451 completed and useable questionnaires being available for analysis. Structural equation modeling was used to explore the relationships among tour guide performance, tourist satisfaction, and destination loyalty. The findings show that the theoretical model fits well with the data, and that the five hypotheses proposed were supported, providing answers three research questions. The finding indicates that tour guide performance plays an important role on foreign tourists’ satisfaction and tourists’ destination loyalty in a package tour. Tour guide performance is comprised of five dimensions – appearance, professional competence skill, solving problems skill, organizational skill, and entertainment introduction skill. Tour guide performance is not only positively and significantly related to the satisfaction of tourists, but also is one of the factors that determine the destination loyalty of customers. This study, moreover, has proposed a number of suggestions for both tour guide and tour manager/tour operator in order to identify the advantages and disadvantages of tour guide attributes, and then to foster and enhance the performance of this force to reach a higher level of customer satisfaction, as well as promote destination loyalty

Assessing observability of chaotic systems using Delay Differential Analysis

Observability can determine which recorded variables of a given system are optimal for discriminating its different states. Quantifying observability requires knowledge of the equations governing the dynamics. These equations are often unknown when experimental data are considered. Consequently, we propose an approach for numerically assessing observability using Delay Differential Analysis (DDA). Given a time series, DDA uses a delay differential equation for approximating the measured data. The lower the least squares error between the predicted and recorded data, the higher the observability. We thus rank the variables of several chaotic systems according to their corresponding least square error to assess observability. The performance of our approach is evaluated by comparison with the ranking provided by the symbolic observability coefficients as well as with two other data-based approaches using reservoir computing and singular value decomposition of the reconstructed space. We investigate the robustness of our approach against noise contamination.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, 5 table

emgr - The Empirical Gramian Framework

System Gramian matrices are a well-known encoding for properties of input-output systems such as controllability, observability or minimality. These so-called system Gramians were developed in linear system theory for applications such as model order reduction of control systems. Empirical Gramian are an extension to the system Gramians for parametric and nonlinear systems as well as a data-driven method of computation. The empirical Gramian framework - emgr - implements the empirical Gramians in a uniform and configurable manner, with applications such as Gramian-based (nonlinear) model reduction, decentralized control, sensitivity analysis, parameter identification and combined state and parameter reduction

Micro-Macro Analysis of Complex Networks

Complex systems have attracted considerable interest because of their wide range of applications, and are often studied via a \u201cclassic\u201d approach: study a specific system, find a complex network behind it, and analyze the corresponding properties. This simple methodology has produced a great deal of interesting results, but relies on an often implicit underlying assumption: the level of detail on which the system is observed. However, in many situations, physical or abstract, the level of detail can be one out of many, and might also depend on intrinsic limitations in viewing the data with a different level of abstraction or precision. So, a fundamental question arises: do properties of a network depend on its level of observability, or are they invariant? If there is a dependence, then an apparently correct network modeling could in fact just be a bad approximation of the true behavior of a complex system. In order to answer this question, we propose a novel micro-macro analysis of complex systems that quantitatively describes how the structure of complex networks varies as a function of the detail level. To this extent, we have developed a new telescopic algorithm that abstracts from the local properties of a system and reconstructs the original structure according to a fuzziness level. This way we can study what happens when passing from a fine level of detail (\u201cmicro\u201d) to a different scale level (\u201cmacro\u201d), and analyze the corresponding behavior in this transition, obtaining a deeper spectrum analysis. The obtained results show that many important properties are not universally invariant with respect to the level of detail, but instead strongly depend on the specific level on which a network is observed. Therefore, caution should be taken in every situation where a complex network is considered, if its context allows for different levels of observability

Prospects for Observing an Invisibly Decaying Higgs Boson in the t anti-t H Production at the LHC

The prospects for observing an invisibly decaying Higgs boson in the t anti-t H production at LHC are discussed. An isolated lepton, reconstructed hadronic top-quark decay, two identified b-jets and large missing transverse energy are proposed as the final state signature for event selection. Only the Standard Model backgrounds are taken into account. It is shown that the t anti-t Z, t anti-t W, b anti-b Z and b anti-b W backgrounds can individually be suppressed below the signal expectation. The dominant source of background remains the t anti-t production. The key for observability will be an experimental selection which allows further suppression of the contributions from the t anti-t events with one of the top-quarks decaying into a tau lepton. Depending on the details of the final analysis, an excess of the signal events above the Standard Model background of about 10% to 100% can be achieved in the mass range m_H= 100-200 GeV.Comment: Final version as accepted by EPJ