Exploring pilgrim satisfaction on facilities for religious events: a case of Ratha Yatra at Puri

ABSTRACTThis article relates to the annual Ratha Yatra festival at Puri, India, and aims at quantifying the pilgrim perception of the event on three major aspects of every facility – adequacy, quality, and signage – to measure their satisfaction. A questionnaire survey (N = 680) was conducted, from which a five-factor structure was extracted using exploratory principal component analysis, further examined through partial least squares-path modeling. The final model was found to have significant positive effects on three factors that comprised adequacy and quality of physiological needs, quality of ancillary facilities, and signage. The outcome may be utilized in planning other pilgrim events for achieving a higher pilgrim satisfaction score.