HOLSAT Holiday Satisfaction Analysis

HOLSAT, short for holiday satisfaction, is an instrument for measuring tourists' satisfaction with a holiday by comparing what they expected before the trip with how the destination actually performed. Developed by John Tribe and Tim Snaith in 1998 and tested in Varadero, Cuba, HOLSAT was a deliberate move beyond the service-quality instrument SERVQUAL, which Tribe and Snaith judged ill-suited to holidays because a holiday is a complex, multi-attribute experience that includes negative as well as positive features. HOLSAT therefore measures both positive attributes, where high performance is good, and negative attributes, where low performance is good, and it captures satisfaction as the relationship between prior expectations and experienced performance on each attribute. The attributes are then plotted to reveal regions of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, making HOLSAT a practical, holiday-specific application of the expectancy-disconfirmation logic of consumer satisfaction.