Geniality, Deception, and Profiteering: the pilgrim's perception of retail stores in Mashhad

Mashhad is one of the largest religious tourism markets in Iran and in the Muslim world. Sustainable development of this market is dependent on mutual satisfaction of service providers and tourists as customers. One of the important sectors of tourism services is shopping and souvenirs, which is mainly provided by retailers. Therefore, this paper tries to identify the tourists’ perceptions of these retailers in Mashhad. In the field of customer satisfaction, customer perception of service provider- customer interaction, is one of the dimensions of service qualities which determine tourists’ shopping experience. For data collection, a random number of 410 pilgrims who have visited the holy shrine of Imam Reza were asked to describe retailers in Mashhad. Collected data was analyzed by quantitative and qualitative content analysis method, pilgrims’ answers were categorized and then the frequency of each category was calculated. The results revealed that three categories of Profiteering, Deception, and Geniality, respectively include 40.7, 36.3, and 27.1 percent of the responses, which are the highest frequencies among the traits attributed to retailers. This could mean that pilgrims’ image of retailers is a person who uses deception and geniality strategies for his profiteering goals. It seems that temporal characteristic of tourist-buyers, as well as tourists’ insists for discounting, lead retailers to "flexible deception" strategies which more guarantee their interests.