Customer satisfaction as a measure of competitive advantage on a sailing school market

Competitive advantage is one of the most important concepts in business development, especially on a highly competitive market such as sailing industry, which recorded a significant growth in the past decade. One of the sources and measures of competitive advantage is customer satisfaction, strongly connected to profitability of the company. This paper aims to identify attributes which increase customer satisfaction in the tourism industry and education institutions combining these two fields in the research on sailing schools. The study considers nine factors selected based on thorough literature review and provides the analysis of their influence on customer satisfaction based on the Kano methodology. The research includes two groups of customers participating in sailing trainings and identifies attributes which might constitute a source of competitive advantage also outside the sailing context.