Keywords: tourism, satisfaction, service quality, transport, backpacking, InterRail.

Tourism is an agent for social change that affects all the factors linked with the culture of societies: norms, values, ideologies and beliefs. It is considered an activity that enables people to interact by sharing cultural, social and economic diverse experiences. Nowadays young people are the fastest growing travelling segment of the population. Thus the young tourist is regarded as an important segment of the global travelling market. Backpacking and InterRail are the major organisations responsible for this.

This paper establishes and compares the satisfaction of InterRailers in relation to the quality of services offered by the railway systems in Italy, Greece and Croatia.

The output of this papers's methodology was that the average satisfaction regarding the rail service is: 3.4142 for Italy, 3.0880 for Greece and 3.1149 for Croatia. Taking into consideration the scale used for measuring the satisfaction criteria, an assumption was made that all results averaging 3 (sufficient) or more would be considered as satisfied travellers. Assuming the average values presented above, it is possible to verify that they are all above 3 then verifying that InterRailers are sufficiently satisfied with the quality of rail services.

Nevertheless, it is to know that there are significant differences in this satisfaction concerning the three destinations, because InterRailers are more satisfied with the Italian railway transport than with the Greek and Croatian transport. Though positive, the average value for Greek transportation is the lowest.

The indicators that were used to evaluate the satisfaction of InterRailers about the quality of rail services in use in Italy, one can conclude that the indicators that show a greater satisfaction from InterRailers are the environment at stations, rail transportation and security at stations. In turn, indicators showed less satisfaction from InterRailers in hygiene and cleanliness of rail transport, the personalized service and information and explanations given at railway stations.

From the indicators that were used to evaluate InterRailers satisfaction of railway transportation in Greece, we can conclude that the ones that induced a higher satisfaction amongst InterRailers are train punctuality and the environment inside the train and train station. On the other hand, the indicators that revealed the lowest satisfaction levels from InterRailers are schedule frequency, capacity of the train and hygiene in the transport.

Finally, with respect to indicators that were used to evaluate the satisfaction of InterRailers about the quality of services in rail used in Croatia, one can conclude that the indicators that show a greater satisfaction from InterRailers are punctuality of trains, the environment in existing stations and rail transportation and security at stations and on the railway. In turn, the indicators that show lower satisfaction from InterRailers are the location of railway stations, the timing and frequency of cleaning and hygiene in railway transport.

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