A Conceptual Framework to Explain the Impact of Visitors’ Previous Experiences on Customer Satisfaction

The article presents a comprehensive and conceptual framework on key factors of intercultural interaction influencing customer satisfaction, which is one of the most important indicators of tourism industry in Malaysia. The theory-based path model of constructs and their possible interrelationships will be proposed such that the future analysis would be based on structural equation modeling approach or related statistical methods. In other words, this study anticipates to propose an applicable technique to empirically examine the inter relationships of intercultural communication competence, interaction comfort, inter-role congruence, perceived cultural distance, previous experience and satisfaction. It is basically a literature reviews on the related constructs and how the relationships' assessment of those constructs should be carried out. Although numerous researchers have studied the extensive topics of cultural distance and customer satisfaction, none of those studies has explored on the critical role of intercultural communication competence and previous experience on customer satisfaction in the industry.