Satisfaction of tourists with public transport system in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Introduction Tourism can be defined as voluntary short term movements of people through time and space, either, between home places and destination or within the destination. Transport system is an essential factor to maintain tourists’ mobility to reach their destinations. Various transportation systems including private and public transport modalities can be used for tourist transportation. However, the concept of sustainable tourism has been identified as a major concept of current tourism. It covers several aspects such as environmental protection, ecology protection and minimized air and land pollution. To achieve sustainable tourism, sustainable mobility of tourists is essentially needed to be achieved. Sustainable mobility can be attained with the use of public transportation systems which have less ecological damages than use of several private transportation methods which may collectively cause extra negative ecological externalities. According to Banister (2008) sustainable mobility is not only objective based transport planning system, but also it needs public acceptability. Public acceptance can be estimated via satisfaction on various elements of transportation systems. In developed countries, public transportation systems are more organized with variety of facilities than developing countries (Iles, 2005). As a developing country, Sri Lankas’ public passenger transport system has not yet well developed and remains highly criticized in terms of quality of the service (Sevenatha, 2002). Therefore, it is essential to evaluate presence of aforementioned objective based transport system with public acceptability in Sri Lanka in order to create positive future changes. After evaluation of tourists’ satisfaction on Sri Lankan public transport, we can evaluate the level of quality of public transport system as they usually answer by comparing the level of their transport experience in their countries. Thus, these feedbacks will help on future development of public transport systems in Sri Lanka. As a result, higher tourism satisfaction with public transport would lead to attract more tourists to public transport and to the country, making it a better centre for tourism. However, the satisfaction on tourists with public transport in Sri Lanka is remaining to be assessed. According to previous studies conducted in Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan passengers are not satisfied with public bus transport system (Kumarage, 2008). Further, according to Sevenatha (2002), some reasons for low passenger satisfaction regarding Sri Lanka bus service are lacks of punctuality, reliability, passenger information and properly planned bus halts. Nonetheless, there is no previous study, conducted which fully examined tourists’ opinion on Sri Lankan public transport. On this Study, tourist satisfaction on different aspects of public transport is assessed.