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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.

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.

This paper aims to determine to what extent hotels and peer-to-peer (P2P) facilities are substitutes for travelers. It then examines whether hotels target business travelers and P2P facilities target leisure travelers.

The author collected characteristics of Shanghai hotels and P2P facilities from websites to determine on what basis the two accommodation types compete. The author then conducted a modified importance-performance analysis (IPA) to determine the relationship between accommodations' provision of these characteristics and their importance to Chinese business and leisure travelers.

The characteristics of hotels and P2P facilities systematically differ, and travelers perceive these differences as important. While the differences are significant across all price ranges, they are smaller for budget hotels than for high-end hotels. The modified IPA indicates that P2P facilities appeal more to leisure travelers than to business travelers. Yet hotels better satisfy the requirements of both types of travelers.

The findings imply that P2P facilities can target lower- and middle-income vacationing families by charging lower prices. High-end hotels can compete by providing more diverse services and greater value to business travelers and higher-income leisure travelers. Budget hotels can reduce costs by not providing non-essential characteristics.

This paper contributes to the discussion of the competition between hotels and P2P facilities by focusing on the Shanghai market. It uses the modified IPA to derive implications for lodging market segmentation.

The means by which leisure can provide a unique means of diversification from the traditional hotel markets of food and accommodation are outlined. These according to industry analysts are likely to demonstrate slow or even negative growth during the 1990s. The general trends in the leisure industry are examined and specific examples of leisure diversification are given with recommendations for effective space utilisation, management and marketing.

Looks at how leisure complexes in urban areas have become the norm in the UK, particularly with regard to the multiple use types incorporating cinemas, nightclubs, theme bars, restaurants, etc. States the article is based on short questionnaires sent to major leisure complex developers and operators within England and Wales in the 1999‐2001 period.

SERVQUAL, an instrument developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry, is currently the most popular measure of service quality. Compares these original studies with subsequent research employing the SERVQUAL instrument. Analyzes its psychometric properties to gain some basic insights into the overall utility of this measure, and offers directions for its use in future research. Discusses managerial implications and recommendations resulting from these analyses.

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.

Purpose built multi leisure complexes have become an increasingly common feature in the urban landscape in many parts of the UK. This paper describes the principal characteristics of these complexes and provides an outline of their rather catholic pattern of locational development in and out of town and on both greenfield and brownfield sites. The paper then goes on to explore a number of the planning issues – trade impact, accessibility and transport considerations, environmental concerns and urban regeneration – raised by proposals for the development of multi leisure complexes.

Investigates the interrelationship between tourism and leisure, based on a questionnaire survey and on personal communication with international tourists, hospitality workers and local residents. Adopts an integrative approach in the case study of the two coastal cities of Xiamen and Quanzhou, in the Fujian Province of the People’s Republic of China. Concludes that superficial homogeneity in social phenomena of two cities in close vicinity does not justify an actual similarity in the interaction between tourists and residents and the integration of tourism and leisure.

Previous research into the efficacy of the quality assurance standards in the ISO 9000 series has rarely focused upon their deployment in services. The UK standard Investors in People (IiP) has received relatively little research attention as a quality management method. The paper reports an investigation of the impact of the two standards on quality management in UK local authority leisure facilities. Three case studies registered to ISO 9002, three registered to IiP and one using no quality management method were studied through management team interviews and a survey of customer perceptions of quality. ISO 9002 was held to be useful by the managers, because it enabled them to provide a more consistent service and helped them to meet their performance objectives. IiP received a more mixed response from managers. However, customers of leisure facilities registered to IiP rated their services more highly than customers of ISO 9002‐registered facilities rated theirs. This was true of all of the elements of service investigated. It is suggested that, if ISO 9002 improves organisational processes, this is not apparent to customers. The results also suggest that IiP may be effective in assisting organisations to improve service quality as perceived by their customers.