ENHANCEMENT TOURIST SATISFACTION THROUGH DETERMINATION OF IDEAL PUBLIC FACILITIES CAPACITY USING QUEUEING THEORY

Abstract

Nowadays, toilet is no longer apparent as merely insignificant component for the public facilities especially related to the tourism area. The facilities in the toilet contributes and serves more than the initial purposes intended. However, public toilet in Malaysia are often seen as poorly designed and maintain by the operator of the toilet. One prime solution for improving public toilet is managing the whole system in a completely new manner based on the user requirement and needs. Government initiative under Public Service Delivery Transformation emphasize on improvement of service delivery to the people and one of initiative is to improve the public toilet especially for tourism spot. This research studied the capacity of public toilet for facility improvement using Queuing Theory to cater the congestion and long waiting time for getting the service. The performance measure of this adopted queue model was carried out to determine the number of users’ waiting time in the queue and system, as well as the utilization rate for the servers. Based on the current users’ characteristics and system, the suitable queuing model is M/M/C with multiple, C servers. The objective of this project is to analyse the capability of current public toilet in producing service that improve users’ satisfaction. Data collection for almost three months conducted with purpose to determine peak time on toilet usage. Two-week data collection sessions were conducted to identify significant variants of data set. Next, data for duration of users’ usage, number of users’ queue outside the cubicle toilet and cubicle bathroom are collected. Based on server utilization rate, the cubicle toilet and female bathroom is insufficient to provide service to the users since the server utilization is greater than 1. Queuing theory again is used to identify the ideal number of toilet cubicles and the bathroom cubicle. Toilets have been renovated to accommodate the necessary cubicle toilet and bathroom. After the improvement, the waiting time has been reduced 50%.