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Public leisure service providers have become increasingly conscious of the need to improve the quality of their service provision as a result of increasing customer expectations, growing competition and government legislation. This paper presents the findings of a survey carried out in the UK, investigating the role of quality schemes in public leisure services. The study shows that a significant proportion of public leisure service providers are using quality schemes to manage the quality of their facilities. In addition, the findings show that managers are using quality schemes to improve customer satisfaction and improve management effectiveness. Finally, the study provides evidence of the positive effect of quality schemes upon service delivery aspects of these facilities, but little evidence of the financial advantages of such schemes.

All public libraries have an important leisure function. For those serving socially stable communities of moderate size, communities without pressing problems of deprivation but in which higher education is not a major industry, it is almost their only function. Large city reference libraries certainly provide information services of indubitably educational nature for students, research workers, industry and commerce, usually serving areas wider than the cities which finance them. Always their librarians are conscious of an educational role, absorbing a quarter to a third of their staff and expenditure, but they too operate lending and community‐based activity services. Smaller towns by contrast maintain informational services adequate for the general needs of their own communities but reliant upon regional reference libraries as referral points for specialist enquiries and research. Authorities serving amorphous, ill‐centred suburban chunks of a large conurbation, with easy access to a large library at the conurbation centre, usually provide little more than quick‐reference and community information services, similar to what better‐centred services provide in larger branch libraries. Prosperous residential suburbs, small market towns and poor inner‐city areas with social problems and unstable populations need quick‐reference and information provision differing as to stock, accommodation and staff. In deprived areas, community information service answering questions on social benefits and personal needs and crises will be the main feature. In prosperous areas, school homework, students on vacation and local leisure opportunities will dominate.

To understand the effects of the best value regime on the public provision of recreation at the level of the leisure centre.

A strategic auditing device is applied to 87 leisure centres to investigate the strategic variables of environmental stability and attractiveness, service strengths and financial resources. The analysis produces a typology of leisure centres, and evaluates the prospects of each type under best value.

The findings suggest that a large number of leisure centres managed by local authorities will make limited headway in implementing best value. What is more, many face problems that will be exacerbated, rather than eased, by current policy. Leisure centres managed by Trusts generally face more benign local environments, which appear to offer greater prospects, but it is clear that Trust status itself offers few advantages outside a greater range of financial sources.

The research focuses on strategic choices as they face leisure centre managers. It does not directly explore the strategic and policy decisions made at other levels.

The paper argues for subtler recreation policy (and by implication, the provision of public sector services generally) that pays due regard to the local conditions of service providers. Policy that focuses only on general prescription of managerial (and often rhetorical) practices will frequently lead strategies towards satisficing performance indicators that may be arbitrary, rather than focusing on problems and issues as they face professional leisure managers.

The use of a formal strategy tool as the level of a service provider is novel, and augments work on hybrid firms facing strategic choices based not only on political factors but also private sector market‐oriented competitors. Further, useful comparisons are made between leisure centres managed by Trusts and those still controlled by a Local Authority. The data provided will also help to inform practical and academic debates concerning the application of quality standards and management practices in the leisure sector.

Reports a review of practice in leisure services carried out by the Marketing in Public Services Group at Loughborough University in 1991 by a UK‐wide survey by postal questionnaire of leisure and library authorities. Interest in marketing is growing in the latter. Response rates exceeded 70 per cent. Describes how far leisure authorities employ dedicated staff, develop marketing strategies, market segmentation, price concessions, and the promotion of new services. Explains how marketing is valued, researched, and provided with training and performance indicators. During the past decade there has been considerable expansion of marketing techniques. The introduction of compulsory competitive tendering during 1991‐1993 has accelerated the production of objectives and strategies to control contractors, and renewed awareness of the value of marketing. There is, however, still confusion between the wide concept of marketing and the narrower tool of promotion.

This paper describes the provision of a feasibility study for the development of a county leisure information service for a shire county in England, and discusses how the structural and political issues that arise are likely to be generic to any service of this type. Analysis is given of the current provision of leisure and tourist information systems, both on traditional forms of media and on the World Wide Web. A solution is proposed that enables the Local Authority and other information providers to avoid unnecessary duplication of existing databases. The argument is developed that existing leisure services must become integrated with Web developments if they are to reach potential customers, who are defined as belonging to two separate categories — county residents and visitors. Recommendations are made that would enable the target audience to be reached by establishing a Leisure Information Web System to reach audiences who maybe anywhere on the Net; and to develop Web kiosks, for use in public places, which may operate offline. The paper also discusses the possible managerial and financial implications of running this service.

Recognising tourists’ increasing desire for authentic destination-specific experiences, the hospitality industry has responded by increasing provision of innovative culinary activities. This study aims to use the concepts of serious leisure and terroir to examine how knowledge, physical environment and service quality influence co-creation within the culinary tourism context.

Following cooking class participation, 575 domestic Iranian tourists were surveyed. These educational classes provide opportunities to learn about local foods alongside peers in an interactive setting. Consistent with the benefits of serious leisure, this consumption context could prove conducive to stimulating co-creation.

Prior knowledge strongly influences tourists’ reflective and recreational motives for participation (i.e. the benefits of serious leisure). This shapes how tourists evaluate physical environments and service quality therein; influencing value co-creation and supporting serious leisure as the conceptual lens through which to understand experiential culinary consumption.

The proposed conceptual model was tested on domestic tourists following class participation. However, in suggesting that visually-stimulating, tactile premises with the olfactory appeal can encourage co-created experiences, the findings are relevant to service touch-point management more generally.

Recognizing the influential role played by the physical and social aspects of experiential consumption, the serious leisure framework improves an extant understanding of value co-creation.

Services marketing research has largely focussed on measuring service quality and satisfaction associated with the primary service itself, with little attention given to the effect of the physical surroundings of the service setting. Leisure services in particular, may be concerned with how consumers perceive the quality of the “servicescape” and what effect the servicescape has on customer satisfaction and repatronage. Investigates these effects, as well as the interactions of perceived crowding, excitement and enduring involvement associated with the leisure service. Results indicate that servicescape quality does play an important role in determining customer affective and behavioural response to the service.

The transfer to partnership in public sector management has created significantly new modes of service delivery, and is suggested to be the best means of ensuring that disadvantaged groups are socially included. The purpose of this paper is to examine New Leisure Trust (NLT) structures in public leisure provision relative to direct, in‐house managed facilities and privately run Leisure Management Contractor (LMC) facilities. In particular, NLTs receive significant government funds and subsidies through tax breaks that are not forthcoming to rivals, which raises questions as to whether NLTs deserve such aid for delivering upon the social inclusion agenda of the government.

The research involved a national survey questionnaire to 1,060 public leisure service providers in England. Empirical testing through multiple analysis of variance and regression analysis was applied to the dataset.

The authors find that NLTs do not follow social orientation strategies to any significantly greater degree than rivals, nor seem to create social inclusion to any greater degree. Further, NLTs have the least to gain in terms of business performance from creating social inclusion, whilst in‐house (in particular) and LMC facilities stand to gain the most.

Though each approach to provision examined places a considerable strategic emphasis on being socially oriented, they are not effective at increasing the social inclusion of recreationally disadvantaged groups.

This paper calls for the current public leisure management playing field to be levelled in a rebalance of opportunity and investment through the removal of anti‐competitive measures.

Previous research has highlighted women’s unequal status in relation to management within a range of service sector industries. Leisure services, however, has remained an under‐researched sector in spite of its growing significance to the economy and its increasing importance as an employer of women. This paper reports selected results from recent research examining gender equity in leisure management. The research, examined gender equity in leisure management and within the professional institute itself. The results demonstrate that women experience both structural and cultural constraints in attempting to secure management careers in leisure but that they remain optimistic about the future. Analysis of the results indicates that this optimism may be misplaced in an industry where women are encouraged to accept large amounts of senior management responsibility for middle management salaries, where routes to promotion remain unclear, and where organisational culture is informed by the dominant “locker room culture” of male sport.

Opaque selling has become popular among service providers in recent years. Although many researchers have investigated the optimality of opaque selling for service providers focusing on heterogeneous consumers, one question remaining unexplored is how the service providers’ optimal decisions are impacted by competitive intensity in a heterogeneous market. This paper aims to determine the conditions under which opaque selling is optimal for competing service providers.

The paper takes a Hotelling model to characterize the competition between two service providers. The authors also consider the interaction between the service providers and intermediary. Service providers act as game leaders and determine whether they should cooperate with the intermediary to introduce the opaque service.

The authors find that two competing service providers do not always benefit from opaque selling in a heterogeneous market consisting of leisure and business consumers, and the competitive intensity plays a significant role in the service providers’ decision optimization. Opaque selling allows service providers to acquire more profit in a highly competitive market or when the market contains a large proportion of leisure consumers. Otherwise, it is optimal for service providers without introducing the opaque selling.

The paper examines the optimality of opaque selling for competing service providers, and provides the suggestions to optimize the service providers’ decisions.

The paper investigates how the service providers’ optimal decisions are impacted by competitive intensity, considering the interaction between the service providers and intermediary.