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The purpose of this paper is to provide strategic recommendations for Indian hotel administrators for improving sustainability practices: environment, economic and social with respect to the supply chain members by analyzing performance dimensions and the importance attached to them.

Importance performance analysis is a tool to analyze the perception of top-level, middle-level and first-level managers in hotels. Questionnaire is developed to collect the hotel manager’s perceptions. The snowball sampling method is used for data collection.

The paper introduces specific sustainability practices, namely, environment, economic and social factors, at the interface of the tourism supply chain (TSC). This will allow the hotels to identify the importance and performance of various sustainability practices to achieve a long-term competitive advantage. The present work finds that the responding hotel managers have given highest importance to the sustainability practices within the organization and the hotel manager’s perception of sustainability practices in the TSC will vary with respect to the supply chain members.

The effort has been made to capture specific sustainability practices across the supply chain. The paper reinstates the fact that sustainability practices are not firm specific and should be practiced at the supply chain interface. The data for the study were taken from focal organizations perspective which is the hotels.

Results provide the hotel administrators to develop appropriate strategies to improve their practices and functions by analyzing their strengths and weakness regarding their tangible and intangible assets. The identified sustainability practice attributes can act as a benchmark and drive the hotel industry toward possible cost-saving conditions by prioritizing the allocation of the resources while taking care of overall performance.

Results will help the hotel administrators to identify the better sustainability practices which will reduce the negative effects and protect the Mother Nature.

The study included hotels/resorts from tourism locations: hill station, backwaters and coastal areas, specifically in the Indian context.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the critical factors (CRFs) of IS/ISO/IEC 17025:2005 laboratory accreditation and indicators of the performance (IOPs) in the testing/calibration laboratories. The impact of accreditation on the performance is analyzed using the level of presence of critical factors that can be used to benchmark the best practices in the accredited testing and calibration laboratories.

A questionnaire is designed on the basis of an extensive literature review on laboratory accreditation and performance. Based on the responses from pilot study, the developed instrument is tested for its unidimensionality, reliability and validity. Multiple regression analysis is carried out to analyze the impact of critical factors on the IOPs.

The findings reveal that the six distinct critical dimensions of laboratory accreditation (which are the independent variables) have a significant impact on the performance of the accredited testing/calibration laboratories. The performance is measured by the dependent variables which are the IOPs. The customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, laboratory performance, image of the laboratory, the number of increased customers and loyalty of the existing customers are highly influenced by the accreditation which in turn improves the performance to gain the competitive advantage.

Contribution to research is in the area of laboratory accreditation and the performance measurement by the development of a comprehensive instrument to analyze the Laboratory Quality Management System. The results are dependent on the number of respondents who are the quality/technical managers.

This instrument would enable the accredited laboratories to analyze their performance through the feedback from the quality/technical managers to gain credibility and to continually improve and benchmark the quality management system in alignment with the quality policies.

This paper proposes an instrument to measure and benchmark the performance of the accredited testing and calibration laboratories.

Industry 4.0 has brought about a paradigm shift in value delivery with the introduction of disruptive technologies. This has resulted in efforts by organizations to re-invent their business processes and reskill their workforce while attempting to realize digital transformation. Quality management in the context of Industry 4.0 is still in its nascent stage with researchers trying to identify key and relevant components of quality management with respect to Industry 4.0. The current study attempts to address the knowledge gap through a literature review and subsequently provide a conceptual framework for quality in the digital transformation context.

An integrative literature review was conducted to analyze and abstract knowledge from the literature on Quality 4.0 and a conceptual framework was developed based on the review.

The review revealed the motivators, building blocks and challenges for Quality 4.0. The conceptual framework discusses the salient points relevant to Quality 4.0 with respect to the people, process and technology dimensions and their sub-dimensions that can be used to build 4.0 capabilities. The proposed framework is represented to depict the conceptualization and the relationships among its components.

This study aims to contribute to the model building efforts of researchers towards Quality 4.0. The points discussed here provide an actionable direction to augment the efforts of practitioners and organizations in quality management in the context of Industry 4.0, especially digital transformation.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate scales to measure and benchmark service quality (SQ) in tourism industry.

The second‐order confirmatory factor analysis is employed to validate the instrument. SQ dimensions have been modeled which have significant impact on customer satisfaction (CS) separately from those which do not have a significant impact.

Hospitality, food, logistics, security, and value for money have significant impact on satisfaction, while amenities, core‐tourism experience, hygiene, fairness of price, information centers, culture, distractions, personal information, and pubs do not have a significant impact.

The above pattern may be different in a different destination, and in a different context. However, a major implication of the current findings is that a destination need not have natural cutting edges to be developed as a tourist destination. A destination with good logistics and assurance for security, value for money, impressive hospitality and food, can satisfy a customer.

The scale which has been developed by us will be useful for destination managers to measure the SQ perceptions of tourists and benchmark destinations. The distinction of SQ dimensions with and without the impact on CS could enable a manager to manage these two sets of factors separately.

Unlike previous works, SQ has been modeled in tourism as a second‐order factor, which appears to be a more appropriate approach. The authors have also modeled factors with and without significant impact on satisfaction separately, and the approach does not seem to have precedence in literature. The inclusion of the factor, “Fairness of Price” is also a new contribution to literature.

Focusses on investigating the critical factors of customer perceived service quality in banks of a developing economy – India. Compares and contrasts the three groups of banks in India with respect to the service quality factors from the perspective of the customers. There seems to be a great amount of variation with respect to the level of service quality offered by the three groups of banks. Identifies the factors that discriminate the three groups of banks. Customers in developing economies seem to keep the “technological factors” of services such as core service and systematization of the service delivery as the yardstick in differentiating good and bad service while the “human factors” seem to play a lesser role in discriminating the three groups of banks. The service quality indices with respect to the three groups and the Indian banking industry as whole, offer interesting information on the level of service quality delivered by banks in India.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the dimensions of service quality in Indian hospitals, from the perspectives of patients and their family members/friends (referred to as “attendants”).

Based on the existing models and the literature on healthcare services, a framework is proposed to conceptualize and measure hospital service quality.

Two instruments for measuring the dimensions of hospital service quality, one each from the perspective of patients and attendants, are proposed.

This framework enables hospital managers to understand how patients and their attendants evaluate the quality of healthcare provided in respect of every dimension. A comparison of perceptions between patients and attendants would aid them to allocate resources to various aspects of healthcare, with respect to these two customer groups. Hospital administrators can use the instruments proposed to obtain feedback on their performance on service quality parameters so that they can benchmark themselves with their competitors.

This paper contributes to research on healthcare services by the development of a comprehensive framework for customer (both patient and attendant)‐perceived healthcare quality.

The purpose of this paper is to provide strategic recommendations to Indian hospital administrators for improving service quality by analysing performance dimensions and the importance attached to them by patients and attendants.

Patient and attendant perceptions were collected using a questionnaire.

Patients and attendants have different perceptions. Different customers have different needs of which providers need to be aware to better serve their consumers.

The study captured only 408 patient and attendants’ perceptions – a 32 per cent response rate.

Results enable hospital administrators to develop appropriate strategies to improve their structure and function by analysing their strengths and weaknesses regarding their tangible and intangible assets.

The study included attendants, specifically in an Indian healthcare context.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight key dimensions of provider‐perceived total quality management (TQM) in the healthcare sector in India. Further, the impact of the dimensions of provider perceived TQM on hospital performance is examined.

A questionnaire has been developed based on an extensive literature review of research in service quality and based on responses of the pilot survey among medical professionals. The instrument thus developed has been examined for its psychometric properties using tests of reliability and validity. Multiple regression analysis has been used to examine the impact of the dimensions of provider‐perceived TQM on hospital performance.

Findings highlight 14 distinct dimensions of provider‐perceived TQM and the relationships among them. Positive and significant relationships among the dimensions and hospital performance have been found.

Contribution to research on healthcare quality by the development of a comprehensive instrument of provider‐perceived healthcare quality.

This instrument would enable hospitals to examine the quality of care being delivered by them to the patients. Hospital administrators and medical professionals could use this feedback to assess hospital performance, and benchmark their performance against that of other competitive hospitals.

Comprehensive instrument of provider‐perceived healthcare quality

The relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction has received considerable academic attention in the past few years. But the nature of the exact relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction (especially in the way the two constructs have been operationalized) is still shrouded with uncertainty. Many researchers have operationalized customer satisfaction by using a single item scale and many others have used multiple item scales. The present study adopts a different approach and views customer satisfaction as a multi dimensional construct just as service quality, but argues that customer satisfaction should be operationalized along the same factors (and the corresponding items) on which service quality is operationalized. Based on this approach, the link between service quality and customer satisfaction has been investigated. The results have indicated that the two constructs are indeed independent but are closely related, implying that an increase in one is likely to lead to an increase in another.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize hospital service quality (SQ) into its component dimensions from the perspectives of patients and their attendants; and to analyze the relationship between SQ and customer satisfaction (CS) in government and private hospitals in India.

The study employs questionnaire‐survey approach to obtain the perceptions of patients and attendants. The instruments developed have been validated using tests for reliability, validity and uni‐dimensionality. Data collected have been analyzed by using statistical techniques such as bi‐variate correlation and multiple regression.

Patients and attendants treat the interpersonal aspect of care as the most important one, as they cannot fully evaluate the technical quality of healthcare services. The study also revealed that the hospital service providers have to understand the needs of both patients and attendants in order to gather a holistic view of their services.

Results of the study are dependent on the nature and number of respondents, i.e. the study has captured only the perceptions of service receivers – patients and attendants; and sample size of the study – 204 patients and 204 attendants – due to limited response rate and other operational constraints.

The present study allows the hospital administrators to benchmark their hospitals with those of their competitors by comparing the mean values of the dimensions of SQ. The study also allows a comparison of the performance of government and private hospitals in terms of the services offered.

The study conceptualizes hospital SQ as an eight‐dimensional framework. Further, it also presents the relationship between SQ and CS in Indian Government and private hospitals.