Exploring the Impact of English Language Proficiency on Service Quality Perceptions in Saudi Arabian Tourism

Abstract

Saudi Arabia's expanding tourism economy places frontline communication at the centre of the visitor experience. In many encounters between international tourists and Saudi service employees, English functions as a practical lingua franca, yet the relationship between employees' English proficiency and tourists' judgements of service quality remains conceptually underdeveloped. This article develops an integrative framework explaining how English proficiency may shape perceived reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy, and overall service quality across hotels, attractions, transport services, restaurants, tour operations, and digital support channels. It argues that proficiency should not be treated as a single test score or as native-like accuracy. In tourism work, its value lies in intelligibility, listening, interaction management, pragmatic appropriateness, occupational vocabulary, and the capacity to repair misunderstandings. Drawing on service-quality theory, English for tourism research, intercultural communication, and studies of trust and behavioural intentions, the article proposes that communication clarity, interactional confidence, personalised understanding, and service-recovery effectiveness mediate the relationship between employee proficiency and tourists' quality perceptions. The strength of these pathways is expected to vary according to encounter complexity, tourist linguistic distance, time pressure, service failure severity, and the availability of multilingual digital support. The article also proposes a future mixed-method research design suitable for the Saudi context and identifies implications for recruitment, training, assessment, service design, and destination management. The central claim is that English proficiency contributes to service quality only when it is converted into accurate, considerate, and context-sensitive action. Language development should therefore be integrated with operational competence and intercultural judgement rather than treated as an isolated educational objective.