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Hospitality
Hospitality quality: new quality
directions and new challenges
Anne P. Crick and Andrew Spencer
Department of Management Studies, University of the West Indies, 463
Mona, Jamaica
Received 4 February 2010
Revised 23 August 2010
Abstract 6 September 2010
8 September 2010
Purpose – This article aims to discuss issues related to service quality in the hotel industry. It Accepted 8 September 2010
highlights unique aspects of hotel work and the implications for service delivery, and discusses
methods used to measure service quality and expectations.
Design/methodology/approach – 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, which 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.
Keywords Customer services quality, Hospitality services, Hotels, Customer satisfaction, Leadership,
Employees
Paper type General review

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
International Journal of
managed, delivered and perceived by the customer. This paper will focus on issues of Contemporary Hospitality
quality in the hotel sector identifying gaps and highlighting new directions. Management
Vol. 23 No. 4, 2011
The term “hospitality” is a broad one, and Brotherton (1999) made the point that pp. 463-478
many encounters have elements of a typical hospitality encounter. This paper will q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0959-6119
focus on those areas of the hospitality industry that involve a voluntary purchase of DOI 10.1108/09596111111129986
IJCHM accommodation, food or beverage for the purposes of convenience or pleasure.
23,4 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
464 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.
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, food service, 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”.
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 Hospitality
guests’ response to them (Crick, 2000). quality
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). 465
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 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 et al. (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 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 also
intense efforts in making dreams and even fantasies come to life.
IJCHM In the research on service quality, there has been significant consensus that guests
23,4 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
466 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” 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” versus “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 (2000) 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.
 Finally, quality service is not a fixed goal but rather a moving target. Customer Hospitality
satisfaction has been the goal of service organisations including hospitality quality
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 467
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 commoditisation
trap by creating memorable service experiences for their guests. While Gilmore and
Pine (2002) 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 (Van 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:
(1) SERVQUAL, a product of the North American school of thought (Parasuraman
et al., 1985); and
(2) the Nordic European model (Gronroos, 1984; Lehtinen and 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-standardisation 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
IJCHM employees and customers interact and their understanding of what customers want is
23,4 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.
468 Staff were found to be closer in 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 that 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 hotel
attributes that were important 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, 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 Hospitality
approach to the measurement of hospitality services views service delivery as a quality
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.

The hospitality employee 469

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:
(1) satisfaction with what was provided; and
(2) 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” (Zeithaml 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 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
IJCHM and retail sector (Nickson et al., 2005). Therefore, employers are placing significant
23,4 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
470 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 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 an important role in helping “back of the house”
employees understand their role in supporting “front of the house” employees to
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 mentor younger managers and supervisors effectively 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 Hospitality
customers were focussed on the more subjective interpersonal factors (Mosley, 2007). quality
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 471
profitability and reduce customer defections (Piccoli 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.
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 travellers’ hotel choices in
comparison to business travellers, while hotel type had a larger impact on business
travellers’ 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 that
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 (2002) 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 and Saraswat
(2003) on the basis that they have favoured larger enterprises at the expense of the
smaller and medium-sized 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
IJCHM their study were likely to receive an apology only rather than corrective action, and
23,4 that this affected guests’ 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
472 given to service employees. Bowen and Lawler (1992, 1995) 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. 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 that 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).

Conclusion
The contribution of this research to the quality service management and hospitality
fields is in the area of hotel service quality. Figure 1 shows the relationships that 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.
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 on 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 that 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 that
only partially recognise a process approach.
 Hospitality
quality

473

Figure 1.
Customer satisfaction in
hospitality: inputs,
processes and outputs

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
IJCHM competitiveness and the increasing sophistication of a public that is travelling more
23,4 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 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
474 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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About the authors

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. Anne P. Crick is the
corresponding author and can be contacted at: anne.crick@uwimona.edu.jm
Andrew Spencer is a Lecturer at the University of the West Indies’ Mona Campus and a
PhD candidate at Bournemouth University, UK.

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