The effect of tourist's expectation and experience quality on recommendation decision: A research

Since the awareness of the cultural tourism has been emerging, countries, regions and destinations has started to emphasize the cultural aspect of tourism in order to increase their share in global tourism market. Museums have atremendous importance with their significant function among the constituents of cultural tourism as a cultural attractions. Museums compete intensively against other museums and other cultural attractions. Consequently, boosting satisfaction level among museum visitors which results in recommendation behaviour is particularly essential for the sustaining the performance of museums. The aim of this study is setting an integrated and dynamic museum visitor behaviour model in order to help to the museum managers, planners and the museum marketing supervisors understand the behaviour of the museum visitors.The research was conducted with foreign tourists who visited to Topkapı Palace museum. The pilot study and the main study were carried out with 100 and 588 foreign tourists respectively. Convenience sampling which is a nonprobability sampling method was used to select sampling units. At the first step of the data analysis process, socio-economic characteristics of sample was examined. Afterwards, to determine which questions should be included in research, an item analysis was conducted. Finally, confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis were applied in the structural equation modelling framework. viiIn the research model setting, which is regarding goodness of fit statistics were adequate, eight hypothesis for the structural model and two hypothesis for the moderator effect in the structural model were tested. In this context, positive effect of experience expectation on experience quality, positive effect of experience quality on satisfaction, perceived value and recommendation behaviour, positive effect of perceived value on satisfaction and positive effect of satisfaction on recommandation behaviour were determined. On the other hand, it was found that experience expectation has no effect on satisfaction, perceived value has no effect on recommendation behaviour and also cultural orientation does not function as a moderator variable. In addition, it was understood that experience quality acted as a mediating variable between experience expectation and satisfaction and also satisfaction acted as a mediating variable between experience expectation and perceived value and between perceived value and recommendation behaviour. KeyWords: Experience Quality, Experience Expectation, Recommendation Behavior, Structural Equation Modelling, Mediating Variable