Search results

Service quality is a growing concern for many service firms in the UK. Today service firms are paying more attention than ever to the needs and expectations of the customers by consistently improving the quality of service provided to their customers. This paper briefly explores the relation between service quality and business performance followed by an assessment of service quality as a framework. The case study focuses on a hotel group in UK, where service quality was measured at six different locations. The findings from the research unveiled that there were significant variations for service quality between the six hotels.

This study investigates the service quality dimensions of hotel resorts in renowned beach destinations of Thailand. It also explores the relationship between review text sentiment expressed in online platforms and the satisfaction ratings provided for those reviews.

The study employs a two-step analysis approach: first, supervised and unsupervised machine learning via support vector machine (SVM) and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) are used to identify service quality dimensions, and second, SmartPLS with PROCESS macro is applied to analyze the moderating roles of quality signals and reviewer’s experience on the relationship between sentiment and satisfaction rating. The dataset comprises 102,179 online reviews from TripAdvisor, focusing on 187 selected hotels rated from 3 to 5 stars.

Eight service quality dimensions were identified, including leisure activities, tangibles and surroundings, reliability, responsiveness, service process, food, empathy and ambience. The study underscores that the service process stands as the sole dimension exhibiting negative sentiment. Furthermore, the analysis revealed a robust positive association between sentiment of review texts and satisfaction, and reviewers’ experience and brand affiliation influenced the relationship between customer sentiment and satisfaction.

Hotel managers should focus efforts on maintaining tangible aspects while enhancing existing service quality level of other dimensions, particularly those related to intangible elements. Independent hotels might implement quality audit to ensure that service quality gaps are monitored.

This study contributes an examination of the moderating roles of quality signals and reviewer’s experience on the relationship between review sentiment and satisfaction rating in online reviews.

Hotel classification systems are used to convey information about facilities and services. Yet, they have been prone to criticism for overemphasizing facilities at the expense of other matters of importance to service quality. In contrast, online travel agents (OTAs) use innovative methods to evaluate satisfaction with hotels. Conventional systems will lose relevance if they do not step up to consider service aspects associated with customer satisfaction. This chapter probes five hotel classification systems along with one OTA and leverages the literature to propose an improved framework classification. This is based on nine critical areas that include service quality, infrastructure, facilities and services, human resources, sustainability, safety and security, accessibility, quality systems, and online hotel ratings.

The competitive nature of the hotel industry has given the impetus to practitioners and researchers to invest in Customer Retention strategies and research. Although numerous studies have investigated Customer Retention in the hotel industry, there is still uncertainty regarding Customer Retention in emerging markets. This study, therefore, adds to the existing knowledge by exploring Customer Retention in Ghana, an emerging market. The study adopted a cross-sectional survey of 873 customers of 56 hotels in four regional capitals located in the southern part of Ghana. Findings indicate that service Tangible and Reliability indirectly relates hotel Customer Retention in Ghana, an emerging market.

Increased competition amongst the hotel industry players has challenged managers not to focus their attention exclusively on ways to attract and satisfy their customers, but to invest in customer retention strategies with the potential to ensure superior performance of their hotels. This study aims to determine strategies to retain customers in hotels in Ghana, an emerging market. A cross-sectional survey was employed to collect data from 677 hotel employees in 56 Ghanaian licensed hotels. Based on SmartPLS, study findings indicate that customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention embedded in the tangibility and reliability dimensions of the lodging quality index are important for customer retention among hotels in Ghana.

Relationship marketing is widely accepted as the most successful way to build customer loyalty and competitive advantage in a mature, competitive market. The study investigates customer loyalty programmes within the context of service quality in Swedish hotels using an online questionnaire survey. Five service quality factors were identified: technical, functional, environmental, technological convenience and technological product dimensions, which supports the Northern European service quality model with the addition of technological dimensions. Five loyalty programme factors were also established and factor scores were mainly undifferentiated on the basis of socio-demographic and behavioural variables. The implications of the results are discussed and recommendations for further research are made.

The aim of this paper is to identify tourists' perceptions of services provided by hotels in Antalya/Turkey and to explore hotel service quality dimensions. Specifically, the objectives are as follows: to identify the dimensions of hotel service quality, and to determine the relative impact of those dimensions on customer satisfaction levels, on customer value and on customers' intentions to recommend or revisit a hotel.

The present study uses the framework which originally appeared in Juwaheer's study investigating international tourists' perceptions of hotels in Mauritius. In this framework ten hotel service quality dimensions were defined by factor analysis and then the most important dimensions for each component were determined using stepwise regression analysis.

Of the ten hotel service quality dimensions, “tangibles” and “food quality and reliability” influence the customer satisfaction level the most. Customer value is explained by five dimensions which generate 37.8 percent of the variance. “Hotel employees and problem solving”, “transportation”, “food quality and reliability”, “climate and hygiene”, “level of price”, “tangibles”, “interaction with Turkish culture” and “friendly, courteous and helpful employees” are the main dimensions which affect whether a guest will recommend a hotel. “Tangibles”, “interaction with Turkish culture”, and “level of price” are seen as the most influential dimensions in terms of customers' intentions to revisit a hotel.

The basic limitation of the study is the unexplained variance, which is the result of the regression analysis. Therefore, future research should aim to determine the factors explaining that variance.

In light of these findings, hotel managers in Antalya can better understand their guests' priorities and consequently, they can arrange their service encounter process accordingly to fulfill these priorities.

This study presents potentially valuable information for hotel managers in Antalya with regards to understanding customer value and satisfaction, which are the key elements in terms of guests revisiting a hotel and recommending it to others. As providing an opportunity for a comparative study of service quality searches, this study contributes to the field.

This study was to develop a methodology of online review analytics for hotel quality management at macro and micro levels. The macro level was for understanding the service properties critical to quality and future development. The micro level was for personalized quality diagnosis for individual hotels.

Textual reviews of superior hotels were studied using latent semantic analysis and Kano model to understand what service properties customers concern and expect. Taguchi's quality engineering was applied to establish a quality reference base using superior hotels for evaluating other hotels in the same semantic space. A decision tree algorithm was then used to identify the properties critical to quality discrimination, and the decision rules were used to diagnose individual hotels.

The service properties concerned by customers for superior hotels were identified. The market positioning and value of each property to customers were clarified. For individual hotels, the deficiencies of service properties were diagnosed. With reference to market positioning, deficient properties of priority in improvement and the strategies for enhancing competitiveness were suggested.

The proposed methodology demonstrated the potential value that review analysis can achieve a new and deeper understanding of customer voices and transform it into more specific business operation requirements. The research and application gap that most previous studies only stayed at the macro-level analytics was filled. Moreover, this study effectively applied the diagnostic techniques derived from quality engineering to online review analytics.

This study aims to delve upon customer satisfaction and service quality within small- and medium-sized hotels (SMSHs) by using a modified SERVQUAL model.

Data for the study were collected from a sample of 253 guests of varying nationalities who stayed at SMSHs of one-to-three-star ratings in the UAE. Moreover, 15 face-to-face interviews were conducted. The influence of the five dimensions of the SERVQUAL model on visitors’ satisfaction was explored using structural equation modelling.

The results indicated that three out of the five dimensions of SERVQUAL, namely, tangible, responsiveness and assurance, have significant positive impact on visitors’ satisfaction of the SMSHs Industry. The remaining two dimensions of SERVQUAL, reliability and empathy, have no significant impact on visitors’ satisfaction.

This study provides a major contribution in that it offers the potential to examine a vastly under researched area of customer satisfaction and service quality of SMSHs in a developing country.

The purposes of this study are: to examine the reliability and validity of the lodging quality index (LQI); and to assess the relative importance of the five dimensions of the LQI in the Canadian hotel context. The LQI was developed by Getty and Getty and published in 2003 in the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.

Data are collected from 200 Canadian respondents who had stayed in a hotel in Canada within the preceding three months. Data are examined using confirmatory factor analysis and regression analysis.

The findings support the reliability and the validity of the LQI's structure of five dimensions. The scale is shown to be a reliable instrument for measuring overall service quality and for predicting the satisfaction and behavioral intentions of hotel guests. In terms of the importance of the five dimensions, the study finds that “tangibility” and “communication” are the most important.

This is the first independent assessment of the reliability and validity of the LQI scale. The research provides valuable insights for hotel managers in Canada. Hoteliers should focus their efforts on the provision of good service quality on “tangibility” and “communication”.