Service quality and marketing mix affecting effectiveness of homestay in The Eastern Region of Thailand

Abstract

Tourism is an industrial that is important to the economic development of the country, especially homestay in the Eastern region of Thailand that is popular because of the potential natural resource. However, homestay operations still have problems that should be developed in order to achieve the goals and effectiveness. The purposes of this study were: 1. to examine the services quality, the marketing mix based operations, and the efficiency of homestays in the eastern region of Thailand, 2. to comparison regarding the services quality, the marketing mix based operations, and the efficiency between the country’s certified standard homestays and the homestays which are not certified, 3. to analyze the factors associated with the services quality, the marketing mix based operations, and the efficiency of homestays and 4. to propose the guidelines for an efficient development of management process among the homestays. The Samples were 826 employees and the tourists in the eastern region of Thailand, from multistage random sampling. The data were obtained from a questionnaire and analyzed by using statistics, Mean, S.D., Independent-sample t-test and Multiple Regression Correlation Coefficient. The findings indicated that 1. the overview of the services quality, the marketing mix based operations, and the efficiency of homestays was in the high degree, 2. the overall services quality between the certified standard homestays and the homestays which are not certified was indifferent, while the marketing mix based operations, and the efficiency of homestays was significantly different at .01 level, 3. there were seven important factors associated with the services quality and eleven important factors associated with the marketing mix based operations which influenced the efficiency of and 4. the guidelines for an efficient development of management process among the homestays in the eastern region if Thailand is including 1. the improvement of marketing communications, 2. the enhancement for quality of services, 3. the development for operators and service providers, 4. the improvement of homestay related standards, and 5) the establishment of collaborated management for cultural activities and intelligence of locality.