Service Quality Of The Hotel Industry

Service quality is referred to a valuation of how good a delivered service meets the customer’s expectation. Upper management

Service quality - refers to difference between the level of service that is expected from consumers and the perception of the service that is actually received. (Caruana,

Hung, Y. H., Huang, M. L., & Chen, K. S. (2003). Service quality evaluation by service quality performance matrix. Total Quality Management and Business Excellence.

Source: A Parasuraman, Valarie A. Zeithaml, and Leonard L. Berry, “A Conceptual Model of Service Quality and its implications for Future Research”, Journal of Marketing, Fall 1985 p44.

The quality of service is the ability of the company to provide something that is beneficial to the customer and can deliver something that is in line with the customer's expectations so that it will create a feeling of pleasure and feel comfortable to the customer (Ali Hasan, 2004: 91; Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry in Muhammad Adam (2014: 13), Tjiptono (2001: 165) in Ni Made Sugiarthi, et al (2012))

Quality is a driving force for improved competitiveness, customer satisfaction and profitability (Edvardsson, 1992). As for service quality, e.g. American Marketing Organization defines it in two ways: first, it is an area of study that defines and describes how services are delivered so thatthe service recipient is satisfied; second, high quality service is a delivery of service that meets and exceeds the expectations of the customers. Parasumaran et al. (1985) state that service quality is defined by the customer evaluation of service outcome and service process as well as a comparison of customer expectations with service performance. Hence, service quality can be thought as the fit between current service level and customer expectations. Park et al. (2004) define service quality as a consumer‟s overall impression of efficiency of an organization and its services. Thus, customer satisfaction is a judgment made based on a specific service encounter. Chen & Chang (2005) suggest that service quality is a process.

Nowadays, customers have been continually aware about quality of service (Soriano, 2002). Service also plays an importance role in a restaurant. A good service can attract customer purchase in their restaurants. Service quality is usually defined as the customer’s judgment of the overall excellence or superiority of the service to the customer (Zeithaml, 1988). Based on the theory, Parasuraman et al. (1988) developed SERVQUAL to measure service quality. SERVQUAL consists of five dimensions which are reliability, responsiveness, empathy, assurance, and tangibles. Customers evaluate the service quality based on these 5 distinct dimensions. Firstly the tangibility refers to appearance of physical facilities, equipment, and appearance of personnel. Reliability indicates ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately while responsiveness represents the ability to provide prompt service and willingness to help customers. Besides that, assurance is defined as an employee’s knowledge and courtesy and their talent to provide trust and confidence to the customers. Last but not list is empathy means caring, individualized attention the firm provides to its customers. According to (Andaleeb & Conway, 2006) , among the

Guest satisfaction is perhaps the most important characteristic in the hospitality industry. The guest must be satisfied with your staff’s work rate. It is extremely important that all your guest’s are happy so that your business will not get a bad name. (www.uniassignment.com/essay-samples/tourism/perishable-service-characteristics) (2015/04/08)

Therefore, it is suggested that service quality may not be a key variable of strategic competitiveness. However, it is necessitated that in the future, XYZ Hotel should continue delivering exceptional service to its guests, as five-star hotel is famously known for its excellency in service delivery. Hence, this can be done by consistently monitor the quality of food served at all the restaurants in the hotel, the promptness level of staff in fulfilling the needs and wants of the guests and not only monitor the behavior and attitude of staff in the restaurant or front office, but also the

Thus, the hotel should focus on people and on its customers and not only on process standardization to reduce the variability mentioned in the first point of this paper. The hotel should intensify its training and develop a customer centric culture among its employees: well trained employees, indeed, are both likely to reduce the assignable causes related to people and to better satisfy variability in customer requests. Pure back-office tasks should be standardized but the hotel should insist on creating, through training, a flexible execution paradigm for its employees. But, as we said, a satisfied customer is not always a loyal customer: in order to reinforce the relationship the hotel should implement the service warranty approach as proposed by Christopher Hart. Service warranty, indeed, “is a marketing tool service firms have increasingly been using to reduce consumer risk perceptions, signal quality, differentiate a service offering, and to institutionalize and professionalize their internal management of customer complaint and service recovery”4, increasing the chances of a returning customer. In order to measure service quality, the hotel could rely on the GAP model (Servqual-Zeithaml, Parasuman & Berry, 1990) which, classifying service quality over five dimensions (reliability, response, assurance, empathy and tangibility) and relying on qualitative questionnaires, measures customers perceived and

Service quality is a measurable set of standard established upon by a provider in delivering services to a client/customer. It can also be viewed upon as a degree of both tangible and intangible expectation coming from a customer’s perspective on how these services are realized by the supplier or by the product coming from the provider.

Based on this traditional definition of service quality, Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry (1985) developed the "Gap Model" of perceived service quality.

As a result, Ladhari (2008, p. 68) stated that “It has been suggested that industryspecific measures of service quality might be more appropriate than a single generic scale”. This argument was supported by Dabholkar et al. (1996, p. 14) who stated that “It appears that a measure of service quality across industries is not feasible; therefore, future research on service quality should involve the development of industry-specific measures of service quality”. Ladhari (2008) reported that in recent years, more attention was paid by researchers and scholars toward the development of an alternative industry-specific research instruments for measuring service quality. Consequently, a number of industry-specific research instruments have been developed in the past several years in different service settings and various countries and cultural backgrounds.

Service quality represents a fundamental aspect of delivery, which strongly influences consumer satisfaction and, as a result, loyalty. In today’s global market a customer’s service expectation has to be met and exceeded eventually in order to retain customers as well as achieve success. Perceived quality of a product or a service is becoming one of the major competitive factors in the business world and has led to the innovation of the ‘Quality Era’ (Peeler, 1996). In simple words, the comparison of customer expectations with service performance is service quality. On the other hand, customer satisfaction is defined as a pleasurable fulfilment response toward a good, service, benefit, or reward (Oliver, 1997). Both of these

Here, Oberoi organization suffered from the total service quality gap, because the service quality (SQ) dimensions those OV team objectively considered most important did not match with the most important perceived service quality attributes of its guests. The OV general manager (GM) was not fully aware of the expectations of the Oberoi customer and hence failed to provide quality service, which by the definition is ‘the ability to constantly deliver service to meet/exceed the customer expectations.’ To recover from this service failure, we recommend Vikram to (i) exhibit effective use of customer feedback to perform root-cause analysis of this service delivery failure so that entire EIH hotel-chain can improve in the long-run and (ii) have GM take immediate corrective action to minimize/prevent