Academy of Marketing Studies Journal Volume 25, Issue 2, 2021 1 1528-2678-25-2-381 INFLUENCE OF SERVICE QUALITY AND TRUST IN SPREADING POSITIVE WOM AND INCREASING LOYALTY OF A TOURIST LOCATION Bidyut Jyoti Gogoi, IIM Shillong ABSTRACT Service quality enhancement is crucial for any business entity. Understanding the service quality gaps helps in improving the customer service. Good customer service quality is essential for enhanced customer satisfaction. An enhanced customer satisfaction helps in generating good word-of-mouth and thereby creating more loyal customers. Trust enhances commitment between the parties and lead to satisfaction. Tourism depends a lot on the flow of traffic to a location. The flow of traffic will depend on good customer experience, good word-of-mouth and recommendations from loyal customers. The researcher in this paper tries to check the influence of service quality, trust, satisfaction and commitment on word-of mouth and loyalty. Keywords: Servqual, Service Quality, Trust, Customer Satisfaction, Commitment, WOM, Loyalty. INTRODUCTION Tourism contributes 10.3% towards the Indian GDP and also contributes to 8% of employment generation (WTTC, 2020). India offers tourism products and services ranging from cruises, adventure, medical, wellness, sports, MICE, eco-tourism, film, rural and religious tourism and is considered as a destination for spiritual tourism for domestic and international tourists (IBEF, 2020). Tourism has a huge contribution to the economy and is considered as an important strategic sector (Abreu et al., 2018; Island & Higgins, 2018; Kelly & Fairley, 2018; Teixeira & Ferreira, 2018). There has been several research contributions in the field of tourism to understand the dynamics of tourism (Cibinskiene, 2012; Jurdana & Frleta, 2016; Montenegro, 2017; McKercher, 2016; Panfiluk, 2015; Santos et al., 2016; Tanford & Jung, 2017; Tiew et al., 2015; Yu¨ru¨k et al., 2017). Tourists do a lot of research and comparisons while choosing a destination thereby giving rise to competitions for drawing in more customers (Teixeira et al., 2019). The capability of a location to service the customers and providing a memorable experience goes a long way to provide an attraction towards the location. The ability of a destination to showcase its attractions and experiences helps in creating differentiation (Cibinskiene, 2012). A tourist location’s attractiveness depends on the thrill and excitement it is able to generate and the quality of services made available (Gogoi, 2020a). Service quality gaps need to be identified and corrected to bring in more traffic volume (Kumar et al., 2008) and sustain competition (Anderson & Zeithamal, 1984; Babakus & Boller, 1992; Garvin, 1983). Commitment, trust, behavioral intention and affective intention helps to increase the popularity of a location (Gogoi, 2020b) There are several studies done on the antecedents of tourist loyalty (Bigne et al., 2001; Chen & Tsai, 2007; Chi & Qu, 2008; Ekinci et al., 2013; Huang & Hsu, 2009). Loyalty of a tourist location will be dependent on various factors such as the available infrastructure, the quality of services, the customer experience and the popularity of the location.