Abstract:
A national museum has the potential to offer an authentic experience about the travel
destination at a glance. Colombo National Museum, being located in the commercial hub of
the island, is a determinant attraction in both cultural and heritage tourism aspects. Historical
perspectives and the prestige artefacts denoted at the museum, attract thousands of visitors per
annum. It is beneficial to measure the visitor satisfaction at Colombo Museum since the visitor
is prominent for any tourist attraction to determine the survival of the attraction. Further the
satisfaction level is critical on decision making of reviews, revisits, recommendations and
creating an image about the attraction. Visitors are arriving with certain levels of perception
and after the visit the perceived experience is resulted on different satisfaction levels due to the
available facilities, features, and services at the site. Major objective is to analyse the service
quality gap at the site as a tourist attraction. Specific objectives are to evaluate the quality of
the visitor related facilities at the site and to explore the possibilities to promote the site with
enhancing the visitor experience with quality services. The research is conducted on both
qualitative and quantitative methods, where primary and secondary sources are referred in data
collecting. Survey technique is used with structured questionnaire distributed for the visitors at
the premises and the museum management was interviewed to identify their intellectual ideas.
The questionnaire given for the visitors is designed based on the SERVEQUAL method where
the visitors’ expectations were compared to perceived experience at the site. 5 elements in
SERVEQUAL model including Reliability, Assurance, Tangibles, Empathy and
Responsiveness were measured. 50 foreign visitors and 50 domestic visitors were used as the
sample based on convenience sampling technique. Findings of the research indicate that there
is distinctive gap between the visitors’ expectations and the perceived experience on service
quality during the visit to the Colombo Museum
