How Quality Attributes of Restaurants Trigger the Post Dining Behavioural Intention of Customers

Abstract

Recent social, cultural, demographic, and economic changes in Sri Lanka have created a new trend among people towards patronizing restaurants in urban areas. The trend, on the other hand, brings about changes in the restaurant businesses where already operating in a highly competitive environment, will be facing an overwhelming competition to attract new customers while retaining the existing customer base. This study was designed to shed light on the effects of quality attributes of restaurants on post dining behavioral intention of customers. Despite the importance of food quality, relatively a little is known about how other attributes such as atmosphere, service quality, other customers and perceived value elicit customer satisfaction, in turn, affects post dining behavioral intention of customers. In addition, this study also delves into which quality attribute of restaurants is highly influential in determining post dining behavioral intention of customers. Self-administered questionnaire was distributed among 130 customers reside in Colombo District since the highest numbers of registered restaurants with the most urbanized residents in Sri Lanka can be identified in the same district. The results of regression analysis revealed that developed model explains the 62.3 percent of variance in post dining behavioral intention. The findings indicated that among five factors, service quality and food quality appeared to be the strongest predictors in customer behavioral intention and interestingly, the customer post dining behavioral intention was least influenced by the other customers. The restaurateurs can utilize these findings for enhancing the positive post dining behavioral intention of their customers. Thus, the researchers recommend the restaurant managers to reasonably allocate their limited resources to enhance both food quality and the service quality to stimulate the positive post dining behavioral intention of the customers