Hospitality Quality – New Directions and New Challenges

Anne P. Crick

Department of Management Studies, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

Anne.crick@uwimona.edu.jm

Anne P. Crick is a senior lecturer at the University of the West Indies Mona Campus. Her areas of study
include customer service management and organizational culture.

Andrew Spencer

Andrew Spencer

University of the West Indies, Mona.

Andrew Spencer is a lecturer at the University of the West Indies Mona Campus and a PhD candidate at
Bournemouth University, UK.

Andrew.spencer80@gmail.com
 Hospitality Quality – New Directions and New Challenges

Submitted: 04 February 2010

First Revision: 23 August 2010
Second Revision: 06 September 2010
Third Revision: 08 September 2010
Accepted: 08 September 2010
Abstract

Purpose

This article discusses issues related to service quality in the hotel industry. It highlights unique aspects
of hotel work, the implications for service delivery and discusses methods used to measure service
quality and expectations.

Methodology

Through an assessment of the extensive body of literature on quality service in general and within hotel
contexts, some key themes emerge which have been explored in detail. Much of the analysis focuses on
how the body of knowledge has developed over time and points to strengths and weaknesses in the
literature.

Findings

There has been much debate about what constitutes quality service and more specifically how this
applies to the hotel industry. The industry is a dynamic one in which the guest dictates the pace and
type of service and in which increasing competitiveness has resulted in satisfactory service being the
minimum expectation of guests. Different measurements of service expectations have been proposed
for the hotel industry but the most promising is the quality function deployment (QFD) approach that
treats service as a process in which the guest’s expectations are measured at every stage in order to
create service that meets and potentially exceeds their expectations.

Practical Implications

The highlighted differences between hospitality, hotel and other service organisations indicate where
managers and researchers need to place their emphasis in order to enhance the level of service quality.

Originality/ Value

The paper adds new urgency to the need to develop effective measures and understanding of the
hospitality and in particular the hotel experience.

Key Words: service quality, hospitality, hotels, guest satisfaction, service employee, leadership

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 Hospitality Quality – New Directions and New Challenges

Introduction

Hospitality organisations are in the relatively unique position of attempting to bridge two worlds

– the domestic and the commercial as they deliver on the service promise. Lashley (2001)

described this as an attempt to ‘square circles’ as employees at the behest of their managers must

provide some degree of hospitality but balance that with the requirement to be efficient and

profitable. Thus, while numerous writers have convincingly argued that the delivery of service is

different from the production of goods, we argue that the delivery of hotel services is

qualitatively different from the delivery of other types of services and that this will influence the

way that service is managed, delivered and perceived by the customer. This paper will focus on

issues of quality in the hotel sector identifying gaps and highlighting new directions.

The term hospitality is a broad one and Brotherton (1999) made the point that many encounters

have elements of a typical hospitality encounter. This paper will focus on those areas of the

hospitality industry that involve a voluntary purchase of accommodation, food or beverage for

the purposes of convenience or pleasure. Typically in these situations the employee becomes a

host and the customer his guest. In the extended encounters that are part of many hospitality

experiences, employees are required to repeatedly affirm this hospitable relationship among

themselves and their customers. For their part, the hospitality guests are in a setting that is

somewhat similar to a familiar domestic setting but they have less control over the arrangements

than they would in a domestic setting. The employee-customer dyad is of course mediated by the

manager who must balance the need to create the warmth of a domestic hospitality setting with

the need to maximise the cold hard cash extracted from individual guests and from the operation.

2
We begin by describing the environment or broader context of hospitality. Hospitality is one of

the world’s oldest professions and it continues to be shaped by its history. At the same time it is

changing quite significantly in response to changing demands and expectations of consumers.

We continue by analysing and discussing the outputs demonstrating the qualitative change that

has taken place in the definition of quality. We will demonstrate that guest satisfaction is now

the mere minimum and that many hospitality organisations conceive of quality as encompassing

emotional concepts of delight and as involving the creation of a memorable experience. Our

analysis highlights the dynamism of the interaction between the customer, the employee and the

manager and analyses the ways in which the organisation transforms and attempts to shape the

behaviour of all of these players so that the desired outcome is achieved. We conclude the paper

by highlighting the limitations of the current research and by discussing areas for further

exploration and research in light of the latest industry trends within hospitality.

Hospitality

The word hospitality is often used to describe the rather broad field that incorporates lodging,

foodservice, leisure, conventions, travel, and attraction (Ottenbacher et al., 2009). It may also be

used descriptively to explain the way in which one person behaves to another. Pizam and Shani

(2009) highlighted the distinction between hospitality and hospitableness arguing that the latter

refers to authentic kindness and generosity while the former refers to the creation of experiences.

They argued that managing this tension between creating the feeling of being at home while

simultaneously trying to create an extraordinary experience is a challenge faced by management.

It may mean striving for the near impossible according to Sherman (2007) who determined that

the ideal luxury hospitality experience may involve service beyond that of a mother, and require

instead the services of an ‘idealised mother’.

3
Hospitality is required to cover some of the uncertainty and fear associated with the new setting

(O'Connor, 2006). It may involve helping guests to have a good time by engaging them in

activities and small talk (Guerrier and Adib, 2000; Crick, 2000; Tracey, 2000; Constanti and

Gibbs, 2005). While they help others to play, hospitality service employees may be expected to

act as if they enjoy their jobs and even as if they are not really working but are ‘paid to play’

(Crick, 2000). They may even be seen as failing in their jobs if they do not themselves seem to

be having fun while interacting with guests (Guerrier and Adib, 2003). The interaction among

employees and guests in resort hotels is often expected to progress rapidly towards relationships

and employees may be held responsible not only for their own behaviour towards the guests but

the guests’ response to them (Crick, 2000).

Hospitality work in summary is complex, challenging, and somewhat contradictory but seems to

incorporate both the pleasures and pains of service work (Korczynski, 2002), with even the

demanding aspects being perceived as opportunities to demonstrate skill and create memorable

experiences for customers (Pizam and Shani, 2009).

In light of these extensive requirements made on many hospitality employees it is surprising that

the industry still has a reputation as offering primarily low skill employment. However, many

employees occupy what Shamir (1980) has referred to as subordinate service roles where their

job is to help the client feel important and in developing countries the emphasis on enhancing the

guests’ status may be even more exaggerated as visitors are encouraged to come to be

‘pampered’, ‘admired’ and spoilt (Taylor, 1975). Employees may even be expected to make

them feel welcome, special and important (Patullo, 1996). Additionally some hotel jobs are

considered to be jobs of last resort possibly because some people associate them with servility

and dirty work (Guerrier, 1999). Finding the best employees to carry out these demanding jobs

4
may therefore be a challenge and high hotel employee turnover continues to be a problem in

many parts of the world (see for example Moncarz et al., 2009; Chalkiti and Sigala, 2010).

We have highlighted certain unique aspects of hotel work that make it particularly challenging.

While hospitality organisations have received their fair share of attention in the study of service

quality, we would argue that they are in the main treated in the same way as other service

organisations. This is surprising since many experts have come to agree that hospitality services

require different management approaches than physical products (Gronroos, 1984; Parasuraman

et al., 1985; Reisinger, 2001). McIntosh, Goeldner and Ritchie (1995) and Reisinger (2001)

argued that hospitality services have a particular challenge in controlling quality due to the

multidimensional nature of the services provided and we argue that it is worthy of detailed study

as a separate part of the service sector. While the increased focus on the nature of hospitality is

heartening, these studies tend to be of a philosophical nature and thus unrelated to issues of

service quality (see for example Lashley and Morrison, 2001).

We would make the case, however, that hotel work is still qualitatively different from hospitality

work. For example, the juxtaposition of room and board and a type of welcoming behaviour

has led to the idea that hospitality involves creating a home away from home. Straddling the

need to create a familiar domestic setting with the need to be commercially viable creates a

challenge that is somewhat unique and interesting, and simultaneously makes hotel work both

challenging and exciting (Pizam and Shani, 2009). Hotel work tends to be of a longer duration

than the average hospitality experience requiring employees to display emotional, aesthetic and

other types of labour in a sustained manner. Hotel employees must often interact with customers

with different cultural dimensions and customer perceptions of quality may be affected by

factors such as power distance (Tsang and Ap, 2007). This means that employees may need to

5
be more multicultural. Finally, many hotel events such as weddings, honeymoons, and reunions

are of a celebratory nature with a lot of emotions attached and therefore require not only detailed

planning and execution but intense efforts in making dreams and even fantasies come to life.

In the research on service quality, there has been significant consensus that guests are the

ultimate judges of the quality of service delivered (Berry and Parasuraman, 1991; Wuest, 2001).

It is their perceptions of quality that will influence what takes place in the organisation and we

will argue that those perceptions of quality are changing and these changes affect what happens

with inputs and the transformational processes within the organisation. We will continue by

exploring the customer’s perceptions of quality and the elements that drive customer satisfaction

in hotels. We will also identify the change from satisfaction of hotel guests to creating delight

and memorable experiences.

Customer’s Perceptions of Quality

The hospitality industry, and hotels in particular, have witnessed increasing competition for high

service quality and customer satisfaction (Parayani et al., 2010). Hotel organisations therefore

need to understand with as much precision as possible what the guests want from the service

experience. Doing so allows them to minimise wasted resources. Being precise becomes

difficult, however, because of the heterogeneity of customers. A number of writers have

attempted to answer the very important question – What type of service do hotel guests value the

most?

What customers value most is changing. For example, many hotel guests are part of that group

that Poon (1993) has labelled ‘the new tourists’. This group has a very different set of needs and

desires which include being more quality conscious and having special interests unlike the ‘old’

6
tourists, who did not mind mass-produced experiences. This again points to the need to

understand these varying perceptions of quality and validates the attempts of numerous writers

(Parasuraman et al., 1985; Gronroos, 1984; Lehtinen and Lehtinen, 1991) to attempt to measure

perceived service quality by guests.

Customers do not respond uniformly to specific service initiatives nor do they respond the same

way to service problems. Liden and Skalen (2003), for example, determined that frequent and

occasional guests of the chain that they studied were more content after a critical incident

compared to customers staying more seldom. The nature of the incident – that is whether it is of

‘low criticality’ vs. ‘high criticality’ also appears to make a difference in the way that the

customers in their study viewed the response of the service providers. They argued that it is

important to consider what kind of rapport the company has with a dissatisfied customer when

initiating the guarantee and the recovery process.

Ladhari (2000), seeking to understand the role of customers’ emotions during service encounters,

concludes that the perception of quality does not just occur cognitively but also has an affective

or emotional aspect to it. The test of a conceptual model showed that emotional satisfaction of

guests along with service quality impacted positively on behavioural intentions of guests.

Ladhari concludes that emotional satisfaction is derived from service-quality evaluation.

Hospitality organisations should therefore focus on more than cognitive satisfaction but should

also pay attention to the emotional aspect of satisfaction. Related work by Mattila and Enz

(2002) determined that customers’ self-declared mood state immediately after the service

encounter and their displayed emotions during the service encounter were both significantly

associated with service encounter evaluations and the overall assessment of the first class hotels

that they studied.

7
Finally, quality service is not a fixed goal but rather a moving target. Customer satisfaction has

been the goal of service organisations including hospitality organisations but Torres and Kline

(2006) argued that customer satisfaction merely means that customers are at ease but they are not

necessarily excited by the firm. Delighted customers are by contrast not only excited but are

likely to give positive word of mouth referrals to others. Delight has been linked to other

positive outcomes including customer retention, higher profitability and may create a

compeititve advantage that is difficult to imitate (Torres and Kline, 2006). Gilmore and Pine

(2002) argued that in a competitive hotel environment hotels must avoid the commoditization

trap by creating memorable service experiences for their guests. While Gilmore and Pine focus

less on the employee and more on the infrastructure needed to create this experience, employees

do play an important part in bringing these experiences to life by identifying the needs and

preferences of different customers and providing creative responses.

Hospitality Quality

Service and quality have been elusive concepts (Hoof, 2002) and many researchers have had

difficulty defining them separately, let alone as a combined concept. Service quality is seen as an

important strategy for gaining a competitive advantage in firms (Lewis, 1987; Hoffman and

Bateson, 1997) and therefore the management of these unique features becomes important in the

deliberations about the delivery of service quality (Bateson, 1995; Fridgen, 1996).

The foundations of quality service management have primarily emanated from two

multidimensional models. SERVQUAL, a product of the North American School of Thought

(Parasuraman et al., 1985) and the Nordic European model (Gronroos, 1984; Lehtinen and

8
Lehtinen, 1991). Both have provided the genesis for much of the structured debate about how

service quality must be conceptualised and managed. According to Ekinci (2002), the

SERVQUAL Model views service quality as the gap that exists between guest expectation and

perceived performance. It suggests that the greater the distance between these two variables

where performance supersedes expectations, the greater the service quality. The work by

Gronroos (1984) however, seeks to differentiate technical quality (described in the SERVQUAL

model) from functional quality and posits that a combination of the two creates corporate image

which should be a third dimension. Functional quality refers to the evaluation of the service

process rather than simply a focus on output.

In hospitality operations, as in other services, the expectations and perceptions of the customer

are heightened because the customer is involved in the performance of the service. According to

Lehtinen and Lehtinen (1991), the emphasis on the role of people in the process leads to a de-

standardization of the hospitality product with many different expectations emerging based on

the individuality of customers and employees as well as the interactions and relationships in

which they are engaged. The quality service experience is therefore driven by the individual

views of each customer and employee and how these intersect. Leaders establish the framework

in which employees and customers interact and their understanding of what customers want is

therefore critical.

Douglas and O’Connor (2003) have examined the extent to which there is a gap between

management and customer perceptions of quality. A survey conducted with hotel managers and

guests in Ireland indicated that there was indeed a gap between managers’ perceptions of

consumers’ expectations and consumers’ actual expectations. Staff were found to be closer in

9
their perceptions of consumers’ expectations even though there were again areas of difference.

This gap is troubling since in the main it has been accepted that the quality of the service offered

must be assessed based on guest perceptions (Pickworth, 1987; Peters, 1989).

There is also a dichotomy between the perceptions of providers and consumers (Jones, 1983;

Shams and Hales, 1989). While hospitality service providers focus on specific service elements,

which include production and marketing processes, guests only see a unified whole. Their

emphasis is therefore on the totality of the experience. The implication for providers is that there

must be a clear understanding of how to address the multiplicity of perceptions which are

contingent on that subjective totality, which is being assessed by guests. An understanding of this

necessitates a measurement of quality in hospitality. Researchers have attempted to adapt the

well known SERVQUAL scale to hospitality and to determine which elements of hospitality are

most meaningful to guests.

Attempts were made by Lewis (1984) and Nightingale (1985) to identify the important hotel

attributes to hotel guests. Derivative models such as DINESERV (Knutson et al.,

1995), LODGQUAL (Getty and Thompson, 1994) and LODGSERV (Knutson et al., 1990)

reinforced the importance of SERVQUAL. The authors of LODGESERV and DINESERV

adopted the same five dimensions to lodgings and restaurants, respectively, and posited that

while the dimensions are similar they appear in different ascending order from the generic

SERVQUAL model. The LODGQUAL authors also relied on these dimensions; however they

created a composite dimension known as contact which was derived from collapsing

responsiveness, empathy, and assurance into one dimension. There have been questions however

10
about whether the scales provide a superior analysis for assessing service quality (Ekinci and

Riley, 1999).

Further development in the literature on quality service for hospitality saw the development of

the HOLSERV model by Wong et al. (1999). This model applied the SERVQUAL model

specifically to hospitality overcoming the limitation of adapting a generic model to hospitality.

The findings of their work suggest that there are three dimensions of service quality –

employees, tangibles, and reliability. Wong et al. (1999) also found that the employee dimension

emerged as the best predictor of overall service quality. Intangibles or empathy, responsiveness

and assurance are encapsulated in all that the employee does. While the HOLSERV model places

emphasis on the role of the employee in hospitality service quality as do many subsequent

articles on frontline employees (Chapman and Lovell, 2006; Sim et al., 2006), intangibles are

controlled by organisational policies relating to service guarantees and service recovery, which

have been largely ignored in this work.

Parayani et al. (2010) have advanced the application of the Quality Function Deployment (QFD)

method to the hospitality industry by using the SERVQUAL as its basis. The QFD is used to

capture the voice of the customer and infuses it into service development. In contrast to previous

applications of the SERVQUAL, the QFD approach to the measurement of hospitality services

views service delivery as a process and itemises each stage by converting customer needs into

organisational processes. It is therefore a more holistic view of service delivery than previous

approaches.

11
The Hospitality Employee

While early work in service quality management was steeped in Taylorism and saw the

employee as an unthinking cog (Wyckoff, 1984), views have changed and the performance of

employees in hospitality is seen as a critical dimension of quality (Wong et al.,1999). As far as

the customer is concerned the employee’s performance constitutes the service (Groonroos as

cited in Hartline et al., 2003) and employees play a significant role in enhancing the guests’ self-

image and status involvement and ultimately, their loyalty (Skogland and Siguaw, 2004).

Further, the customer’s perception of service quality has at least two elements – satisfaction with

what was provided; and the way in which this was delivered by the front line employee

(Chapman and Lovell, 2006). Sim et al. (2006) also determined that hospitality was a significant

indicator of customer satisfaction and that the perception of hospitality was primarily associated

with employee actions in this study.

The movement away from the production line reflects in part the recognition of the important

role that individual employee actions play in customer satisfaction as well as the impact of new

models such as relationship marketing and the service-profit chain (Berry, 1995; Heskett et al.,

2008). Increasingly, employees are being used as ‘walking billboards’ (Zeithmal and Bitner,

2003 as cited in Nickson et al., 2005). Moreover, they are no longer passive elements in the

company’s brand strategy but are required to live the brand (Brexendorf and Kernstock, 2007).

In addition, service organisations are increasingly dependent on the authenticity of their service

employees since authentic employees may have a greater impact on the customer’s emotional

state than non authentic employees (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2006). Managers therefore have to be

concerned about hiring and retaining those employees who are motivated to perform the

12
emotional, aesthetic, scripted, and voluntary acts that are such an important part of service. In

particular, they have to be concerned about the performance of emotional labour as employees

may withhold smiles and even courteous behaviour or ‘go into robot’ (Hochschild, 1983).

Punjaisri et al.(2008) found that the relationships that employees had with colleagues and their

leaders were influential in their attitudes and performance in delivering the brand promise.

Specifically, when employees felt comfortable with colleagues and their colleagues were

supportive, they felt part of the hotel brand which increased their commitment and intention to

stay. Vieira (2005) also determined that the managers in their study felt that co-workers’ support

was more important than the support of supervisors.

The role of employees has also changed as experienced hospitality workers cannot rely on past

procedures since they are continually faced with novel situations requiring unique methods of

response to the customer (Bowen and Ford, 2004). Employees are increasingly being seen as

embodying the image of their company in the hospitality and retail sector (Nickson et al., 2005).

Therefore, employers are placing significant emphasis on soft skills which include aesthetic and

self-presentation skills as well as the better known emotional labour skills.

Employee personality traits are therefore an important part of their performance and have an

indirect impact on the delivery of quality service and researchers have attempted to find which

characteristics are most related to customer orientation. The findings reflect the complex and

demanding nature of hotel work. For example, conscientiousness drives organisational

commitment, performance and job satisfaction and therefore employers should seek to recruit

conscientious employees (Silva, 2006). Paraskevas (2001) studying chain hotels in Greece found

that employees valued professionalism, dependability, conscientiousness, communication, and

13
consideration in their internal service providers. Liu and Chen (2006) also found that

agreeability, stability, activity, and conscientiousness relate and contribute to the customer’s

orientation of frontline employees and supervisors. Finally, the opinions, values, beliefs, and

behaviour of staff members with respect to service can also be impediments to quality service

(Presbury et al., 2005).

Management

Leaders of the organisation establish the framework in which employees and customers operate.

Researchers have therefore attempted to understand how various leadership traits and behaviours

influence service quality. Kim et al. (2009) have built on the work of others (Ahmed and

Parasuraman, 1994; Hartline and Ferrell, 1996) and advanced the debate on the role of managers

in the process of delivering quality service. They argued that management commitment to

service through initiatives such as organisational support, rewards, empowerment, and training

will lead to job satisfaction and ultimately the delivery of high quality service by front line

employees. Moreover Clark et al. (2008) determined that a manager’s own commitment to

service quality will directly influence the commitment of front line employees. They further

posited that transformational leadership, which is reflected through the empowering leadership

style in this study, is most ideally suited for frontline workers. It would therefore appear from the

research on leadership styles that directive leadership is incompatible with the service

environment (Hartline and Ferrell, 1996; Clark et al., 2008).

The literature also examines the inspirational role that leaders may play in exhorting hospitality

employees to deliver quality service. Bowen and Ford (2004), for example, noted that they play

14
an important role in helping ‘back of the house’ employees understand their role in supporting

‘front of the house’ employees achieve the organisation’s mission. They also proposed that the

manager may model the appropriate behaviour for staff members by treating front line

employees in the way that they wish them to treat their guests. Leaders also serve as models to

others in hotels and their failure to effectively mentor younger managers and supervisors may be

an impediment to quality service (Presbury et al., 2005).

Leaders must establish priorities and to deliver quality service they must understand what their

customers want. Saleh and Ryan (1991) determined that there was a gap between what managers

thought that their guests wanted and that while managers tended to overestimate guest

expectations, they appeared to fall short in the delivery of the service. Senior hospitality

managers tended to emphasise the more functional, objective, and controllable aspects of the

quality service experience while customers were focussed on the more subjective interpersonal

factors (Mosley, 2007). Piccoli et al. (2003) highlight customer relationship management as one

of those decisions that managers make that has the potential to have a lasting impact on the

organisation. Customer relationship management (CRM) is defined by them as a management

philosophy that calls for the reconfiguration of the firm’s activities around the customer. By

placing the focus on the customer organisations may improve profitability and reduce customer

defections (Picocoli et al., 2003). They argue that while CRM is often used to refer to the

technology that underpins it, it is a broader concept and is in fact an enterprise wide commitment

to identifying and creating a beneficial relationship between the customer and the organisation.

They emphasise that this commitment is more than acquiring the technology – it involves a total

reconfiguration of the hotel’s operations in order to deliver consistent and highly personalised

service at every customer touch point.

15
Leaders also play an important role in determining which service innovations to introduce

(Victorino et al., 2006). They may be supported in their choice by statistical models such as

discrete choice analysis (DCA), which has been accurate in other contexts and may be accurate

in helping to predict the relative market impact of various service offerings. Their study based

on DCA determined that service innovation did matter across hotel guest segments when they

were choosing a hotel. Service innovation had a larger impact on guests selecting economy

hotels in comparison to midrange or upscale hotels. Technological improvements and

customisation features had a stronger impact on leisure travelers’ hotel choices in comparison to

business travelers while hotel type had a larger impact on business travelers’ choices. Managers

therefore should engage in service innovation but selectively so based on their market segments.

Managers would also have to engage their employees who are engaged in this service

development.

The culture is another important priority and Curtis and Upchurch (2008) asserted that the

process of creating a service culture becomes a management process and managers must

therefore seek to understand the systems, practices, and procedures that create the requisite

service culture. Related to the culture are the human resource practices of the service

organisation and researchers have focussed on case studies which are used to highlight the best

practices of successful service organisations. Mayer (2002), for example, described the four

practices of the Florida Theme Park (FTP). These include the rather evident practices of hiring

the right people, developing them to deliver service quality, providing needed support system

and retaining the best people. Mayer’s specific contribution is to highlight how these practices

help the FTP to adapt to the specific environmental challenges that face it. The case studies

while interesting and insightful have been criticised by Chowdhary et al.(2003) on the basis that

16
they have favoured larger enterprises at the expense of the smaller and medium enterprises. In a

refreshing analysis of third world service organisations, they describe the ways in which small

Mexican organisations also practised excellent service. Lockyer and Scholarios (2004) also

argued that for smaller organisations successful human resource strategies tended to take into

account the specific environmental situations rather than the conventional best practices.

Leaders are resource handlers and their willingness to provide resources will have an impact on

quality. Lewis and McCann (2004) found, for example, that hotel guests in their study were

likely to receive an apology only rather than corrective action and that this affected the guest

perception of service quality. The extent to which employees can respond with action is of

course related to the resources provided – a managerial decision. Budgetary constraints were

also found to be one of the major impediments to improvements in service quality in luxury

hotels in Australia (Presbury et al., 2005).

Finally, leaders play an important role in determining the amount of autonomy given to service

employees. Bowen and Lawler have argued that empowerment allows employees to be more

responsive and more capable of giving delight and provides guidelines about the contingent use

of empowerment (Bowen and Lawler, 1992; 1995). The authority to solve customer problems

was an important factor in determining the implementation of quality service (Harrington and

Akehurst, 2000). Melhelm (2004) extends the Bowen work by testing the conditions which are

most conducive to empowerment. The results indicated that trust, incentives, communication,

and employee knowledge were critical aspects. Empowerment is, however, more than just

giving employees more power but the entire organisation must be supported by user-friendly

systems and processes (Kandampully and Duddy, 2001).

17
Conclusion

The contribution of this research to the quality service management and hospitality fields is in

the area of hotel service quality. Figure 1 below shows the relationships which have been

covered in this article as well as what the authors argue is the key to achieving hotel guest

satisfaction at the very minimum.

Figure 1: Customer Satisfaction in Hospitality: Inputs, Processes and Outputs

CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS

INPUTS OUTPUTS

• HOTEL • SATISFACTION
MANAGERS
• DELIGHT
• HOTEL
EMPLOYEES • EXPERIENCES
•

SERVICE PROCESSES

Consumer research Culture HR Activities Service Delivery

QUALITY FUNCTION DEPLOYMENT (QFD)

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The literature on quality service in hospitality has not developed uniformly, with pockets of

theories and models emerging about various sectors in the hospitality industry. The research in

the field needs to take a more focussed approach and recognise the nuances of each sector. The

authors have therefore chosen to focus more specifically at hotels with a view that there is

greater intensity involved in providing service over prolonged periods in a lodging setting as

opposed to shorter service encounters. Much of the extant work on service quality in hotels has

led to the conclusion that hotels are facing increased competition for higher service quality and

customer satisfaction (Parayani et al., 2010). This is further exacerbated by differences

emanating from the service quality perceptions of managers and employees (Douglas and

O’Connor, 2003).

Figure 1 demonstrates a framework being proposed by the authors, which seeks to assert a claim

that these differences may be reconciled. This framework is however preliminary and aims to

open up avenues for future research in the field. It first takes into consideration the overarching

influence of the expectations of the hotel customer. While there are mediating variables which

separate customers’ expectations from actual satisfaction or delight, the authors contend that

there is a more direct relationship between expectations and service output which has been put

forward in the literature. Given that ‘met expectations’ produce satisfaction and ‘exceeded

expectations’ produce delight and experiences much of the work in the area has taken a

simplistic view of how this conversion takes place. This is highlighted in the work of Saleh and

Ryan (1991) which concludes that while managers overestimate guest expectations they fall

short in service delivery. This may be due in part, to models presented which only partially

recognise a process approach.

19
Despite the numerous models reviewed in this article only the recent work of Parayani et al.,

(2010) in applying the Quality Function Deployment method to the industry, provides a detailed

process approach to infusing the voice of the customer into service design. In Figure 1 the

alternative approach to the previously discussed direct relationship between the confirmation or

disconfirmation of expectations and actual satisfaction levels, may be seen as customer

expectations influence input and processes related factors. What is particularly unique to this

approach in hotels is that the processes in which managers and employees engage are monitored

at every step of the conversion process to ensure that the voice of the guest is not lost. For

example, where consumer research is fed into the culture of the organisation, the way in which

the organisation carries out all its activities including those related to human resources will

reflect the intention to meet these consumer needs. This detailed monitoring approach referred to

as the ‘QFD flowdown process’ allows for organisations to tailor the needs of guests into every

facet of operations and increases the likelihood that what is provided is, at the very minimum,

satisfaction or ‘met expectations’.

Hotel organisations, which are in the unique position of sustaining these service experiences over

an extended period, should in particular adopt process approaches which lead to less service

failures, given that the probability of service breakdown is higher as a result of the likelihood of

many encounters in one vacation. Because of their competitiveness and the increasing

sophistication of a public that is travelling more and has more options and information about

individual hotels, service quality will continue to be a source of competitive advantage. We echo

the recommendation of Pallet et al. (2003) that the implementation of quality should be seen as a

20
journey. We would argue that the journey has started well with the establishment of unique

models for the hotel industry and we would propose that the QFD incorporates the views of hotel

guests in a way that was not evident in earlier models and builds a foundation for other dynamic

models that take into account the heterogeneity and complexity of the hospitality experience.

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