Monitoring Customer Satisfaction by Innovative Statistical Methods and Models with Application to Tourists' Opinions Paolo Bordignon and Luigi Salmaso (University of Padova, Italy) Monitoring quality of tourists' opinions is becoming an important issue also for companies providing sport services. The aim in this paper is to apply a new class of models (specifically an extension of CUB models according to Piccolo 2003) and nonparametric permutation methods (according to Pesarin and Salmaso 2010) to a large customer satisfaction survey performed during the winter season 2011-12 on services provided by the ski schools of Alto Adige (Italy). Specifically the parents of young children under the age of 13, who participated in ski courses organized in the Ski Schools, were asked to answer a questionnaire to express their level of satisfaction about some aspects of the service. The data processing is mainly aimed to two goals: 1. To calculate a global index of quality, as synthesis of the customer satisfaction for the various evaluated aspects; 2. To estimate the degree of feeling toward the service and the degree of uncertainty of the respondents and to detect if and how the personal characteristics of the customers can affect these two psychological components, according to the idea that customer satisfaction can measure the perceived quality of the service. Key words: Customer satisfaction survey, permutation tests, rankings, CUB models, NPC test Introduction In the sport tourism field, the customer satisfaction and service quality dimensions are crucial points in order to deliver a high quality service and to be competitive. Measure such dimensions with appropriate tools is therefore of fundamental importance. In a winter sport tourism framework, we propose to measure customer satisfaction and service quality by means of recent developed statistical tools. A preliminary literature review shows the advances in active sport tourism field with particular attention to service quality studies. The methodology section will present the methods and models applied to tourists’ opinions. Then the case study will be introduced describing a survey performed in order to monitoring customer satisfaction for ski schools’ services. Literature review The past decades have seen an increased trend towards more active holidays with a growing interest within academic circles (Smith and Jenner 1990), particularly for the sport tourism field. One of the Sport tourism definition is “travel for non-commercial reasons, to participate or observe sporting activities away from the home range” (Hall 1992). Weed and Bull (2004) suggest five types of sport tourism: tourism with sport content, sport participation tourism, sport training, sport events and luxury sport tourism. The research is usually guided by the definitions adopted. The definition of “sports tourism” is the starting point in Weed (2009); his paper, a meta-review of 18 reviews from 1990 to 2008, aimed at tracing the different paths taken by researchers in sports tourism field. Delineating the contributions in sports tourism field, Weed (2009) and Weed (2006) describe the “event sports tourism” as the main researched area followed by “active sport tourism”, particularly golf and ski tourism. Golf and ski tourism have been categorized as “ active sport tourism” (Gibson 2002) or “sports participation tourism” (Weed and Bull 2004) by several authors (Chaplin 2001, Gibson 2003 and Jackson and weed 2003). Moreover it is worth to cite some studies that have been dealt with the behaviours of sport tourists. They include: Petrick and Backman’s (2002a, 2002b, 2002c) work on the satisfaction and value perceived by golf tourist; and Williams and Fridgeon’s (2000) research on the barriers that keep many potential skiers off the slopes and trials. As stated by Chaplin (2001), sports tourism field is “multi-faceted” with authors performing sport tourism researches from different disciplinary perspectives. Weed (2009) invite scholars from other disciplines to contribute to the sport tourism research. Finally, Weed (2009) intended to highlight also the scarcity of studies related to customer satisfaction particularly for winter sports.