Atributos promotores de satisfação dos turistas nos destinos turísticos em razão da pandemia covid-19

Abstract

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, which broke out in December 2019 in China, started a health crisis of global proportions never seen by this generation and the tourism sector was one of the most affected. To contain the disease, sanitary measures were imposed on all branches of society and tourism was no different, as its normal functioning was interrupted. With the advance of vaccination against Covid-19, the attenuation of the disease and the gradual resumption of tourism occurred, but there are indications that the behavior of tourists may have been affected depending on the context experienced. Therefore, trying to understand what tourists expect to find and consequently promote their satisfaction in tourist destinations, taking into account the context experienced in the pandemic, has become an even more important topic to be discussed in the field of tourism. In this sense, this study proposes to discover what are the attributes that promote tourist satisfaction in tourist destinations due to the pandemic and to validate a new scale to measure these attributes. To this end, a mixed methods study was carried out, consisting of 02 phases. First, an exploratory qualitative study was carried out, based on the opinion of the participants of 02 online focus groups carried out with the purpose of raising attributes that were being valued by tourists during their trips and that, in the opinion of the participants of the focus groups, promoted the their satisfaction in tourist destinations. Subsequent to this phase, a descriptive quantitative study was carried out, with the application of 01 structured questionnaire, with a sample of 208 tourists who made at least one tourism trip in 2021 or 2022. For data analysis, in the 1st phase methods were used with an exploratory approach and in the 2nd phase with a descriptive approach. As a result, a new scale was presented to measure the satisfaction of tourists in tourist destinations, taking into account the context experienced by them in the pandemic, consisting of 05 dimensions and 26 variables. In addition, the results suggest that possibly tourists will value tourist destinations that maintain the sanitary health protocols used in the pandemic and these attributes will impact their satisfaction with the tourist destination visited. Therefore, it is expected that the results of this research contribute to the advancement of studies on the proposed theme and also help those interested in the tourism sector to better understand the needs and expectations of tourists through the evaluation of their satisfaction.