Personnel Service Quality and Travellers' Behavioural Intentions in Tanzania's Intercity Public Road Passenger Transport: The Mediating Role of Customer Satisfaction

Abstract

Background: Personnel service quality is central to intercity public road passenger transport, yet little is known about whether personnel at different touchpoints along the travel chain relate to travellers’ behavioural intentions directly or through customer satisfaction. Existing transport research rarely distinguishes personnel encounters across different intercity travel touchpoints. Aims: This study examined the relationships between the service quality of intercity bus, bus-terminal, and en-route bus-stop personnel and travellers' behavioural intentions, with customer satisfaction as a mediator. Study Design: Quantitative explanatory cross-sectional study. Place and Duration of Study: Passengers travelling from Dar es Salaam to Arusha, Dodoma, Mbeya, and Mwanza, Tanzania, were surveyed during their journeys from July to December 2023. Methodology: A multistage probability sampling procedure combined systematic selection of registered buses from route-specific LATRA lists with simple random selection of passengers from the sampled buses. A total of 480 questionnaires were collected. After data screening, 38 questionnaires were excluded because of substantial missing information or failure to meet the prior-route-experience criterion, leaving 442 usable responses for analysis. Data were analysed using IBM SPSS Statistics 27 and PLS-SEM in SmartPLS 4. Results: En-route bus-stop personnel service quality (β = .209, P < .001) and bus-terminal personnel service quality (β = .163, P = .024) were positively related to behavioural intentions, while intercity bus personnel service quality was not (β = .096, P = .273). Intercity bus personnel service quality was positively related to customer satisfaction (β = .508, P < .001), which was positively related to behavioural intentions (β = .377, P < .001). Customer satisfaction showed indirect-only mediation for intercity bus personnel (β = .191, P < .001), complementary mediation for en-route bus-stop personnel (β = .046, P = .047), and no mediation for bus-terminal personnel. The model explained 46.3% of customer satisfaction and 52.4% of behavioural intentions and showed medium out-of-sample predictive power. Conclusion: Personnel service quality is related to behavioural intentions through different statistical pathways across the intercity travel chain.  Operators and regulators should therefore apply touchpoint-specific personnel standards, training, monitoring, and passenger-feedback systems.