Festival Service Quality for Foreigners Including Canadians: A Case Study of the Jinju Yudeung Festival

Festival Service Quality for Foreigners Including Canadians: A Case Study of the Jinju Yudeung Festival

Since 1995, the local autonomy system was launched nationwide, and cultural festivals have started to flourish, supported by the Korean MCST (Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism) Among many well-known Korean cultural festivals, Jinju Namgang Yudeung(Lantern) Festival is considered to be one of the most popular festivals, favored not only by Koreans but also by foreigners from many different countries. So far, previous research papers on Jinju Yudeung Festival have only focused mainly on Korean visitors and there is no sufficient study on foreign visitors and their evaluation of the festival yet. Therefore, this research paper plans to study the foreign visitors’ opinions and their evaluation in order to be able to make valuable suggestions conducive to development and improvement of Jinju Yudeung Festival’s facilities and programs by conducting an importance-satisfaction analysis (ISA) on foreigner visitors of Jinju Yudeung Festival. A total of Jinju Yudeung Festival’s 112 foreign visitors participated in this study. The participants were mostly in their 20s (54.5%) and 30s (32.1%). In terms of nationality, Americans (34.8%) comprised of the majority, and then Canadians (10.7%) and Chinese (10.7%). For the means of transportation, bus (59.8%) was the most common. The majority of the participants’ number of visit was ‘first visit’ (60.7%). The overall satisfaction ratio reached 75.74%. As a result of the importance-satisfaction analysis, it has been noticed that a variety of cultural learning materials, development of various programs, expansion of rest areas, reasonable price and a variety of food are the most important areas that should be properly taken care of and improved in order to make Jinju Yudeung Festival more attractive and successful.