Measuring the Quality of the Tourism Product in the Tour Operator Business

In the context of globalisation of tourism markets and increasing competition, there is a need of continuous improvement of the tourism product quality. This problem became especially urgent after the entry into force of the Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement. This article deals with the theoretical, methodological and practical problems of assessing the quality of the tourism product of regional tour operators in Ukraine. The main attention is paid to the analysis of the quality of the tourism product standard components having latent features. To study the quality of the service components form a tourism product by their latent features, the authors used the methodology of taxonomic analysis, which combines a number of statistical methods of comparison on multivariate objects, structural units, which are determined by a set of values of several features. The analysis of the tourism product quality was carried out on the example of ten tour operators in Odessa Region, Ukraine, providing services on the bus tour Odessa–Chernivtsi – Khotyn – Kamianets-Podslsky – Ternopil–Odessa under standard conditions. Based on the tourism product structuring, seven assessment indicators for the level of the tourism product quality were determined. Upon the calculation of distances to the reference object and the taxonomic index values, tourism enterprises were ranked by the quality of their tourism product in the competitive segment of the market and reserves for improving the tourism product quality by its components were determined. The authors determined that the method of combined taxonomy allows comparing the quality of one-type standard tourism products of Ukrainian tour operators dealing in the same market segment. The experience of experimental verifying the proposed approach to the assessment of the tourism product quality levels shows that the technique under consideration can complement the modern tools for measuring the tour operators’ service quality. The results can be useful in practice to improve the research of comparative evaluation of the tour operators’ tourism product quality by latent characteristics in a competitive environment.