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Service Quality From Hospitality Industry Perception Marketing Essay

Paper Type: Free Essay Subject: Marketing
Wordcount: 2779 words Published: 1st Jan 2015

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Besides that, our group very appreciates to all the people, who contribute a part in the assignment by answering all the questionnaires designs. We truly needed the data for our assignment and thank you for such great help. Fully cooperation is given help improved a lot in the progressing of completing the assignment. Group members play their important roles, supporting, keep motivate each other and carry out responsibility to completing all the assign tasks that had been given out within limited time frame. We hold as on team solve the entire problem we faced and managed to complete the assignment before the due date.

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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to study and test a conceptual model importance of “service quality” in the hospitality industry. The way of the hotel managed in operation level in order to provide better service and accommodation compared to competitor so that the hotel will able to retain customer’s loyalty for long term business. Since the tourism sector on growing, many hotel, resort, and restaurant build out and faced tight competitor in the industry. With increasing competition, the organization must established stronghold base on service quality so that the numbers of customer retention will double or triple in the business. Service quality is one of the element that play important role in the hospitality industry whereby excellent services offered toward the guests will gain the demand and intention of revisiting again in the future.

Background of Research

Statement of Problems

Hotel service quality is

Research Aims/Objectives

1. To identify the importance of service quality for hotel operation.

2. To analysis the advantages and effectiveness of the service quality towards the hotel organization.

Research Questions

1. Why the element of service quality is important for the hotel operation?

2. How service quality will able to help the organization make improvement in hotel operation?

Research Hypothesis

Hotel needs to provide excellent service quality for secure long term business.

Literature Review

Introduction

Hospitality sectors such as hotel and resort nowadays not only focuses in create demand in the market segmentation but the management also noticed the importance of service quality which become one of the element in regenerating the revenue for the organization. Most of the country in the world experience drastic development in tourism market, services quality becomes increasingly important and competition becomes fierier especially in hospitality industry (Tai, 1994). International hotels and resorts improving service quality form time to time focuses on technical (tangible) and functional (human interaction) so that the customers can experience differentiate services in varies hotels and resorts (Ronald, Michèle, Charles, & Romain, 1999).

In the free-market economies, customers now holding the purchasing power and the service providers have to take seriously on what the customer needs and wants; therefore, the importance of service quality has been emphasized even more in the business (Kondo, 2000). Service provider that did not meet the standard of the consumer’s perception, the consumers would not return patronizes in the same organization because of the past experience and negative feedback on the service quality, employee’s attitude, poor accommodation and others elements. Study shows that most of the satisfaction customers staying in the resort which provided excellent accommodation and services had become the major factor triggered loyalty in the senses of the customer’s mind (Seth, Deshmukh and Vrat 2005).

There are lots benefit of the hotel and resort providing excellent service quality include increased customer satisfaction, number of customer retention increased, enlarge the segmentation of market share, minimize operating cost and gaining higher revenue level compare to competitor (Kang and James, 2004). When the organization has a stronghold bases in service quality running in the operation, the number of customers will greatly increases in long term business and customer satisfaction is another philosophy that tent to creating value for customers, anticipating and managing customer expectations in order to satisfy the needs (Dominici and Guzzo, 2010). Through analyze the importance of service quality, the management team will able improve the service quality in operation and gain better advantages bring the business into another stage (Chen & Ting, 2002).

Service quality from hospitality industry perception

There are different definitions given by different scholars about the term service quality. It is hard to identify the real definition used as with the changes of the environment over time, the concept of service has also changed. The term service is one of the marketing skill that needed to sell products through interactive situation, whereby a seller offered a variety of activities, pursues, introduce the benefits or intend to satisfaction the buyer in order to promote the product in hand (Buell, 1984). Service does not necessarily come with physical goods, it referring the activity or the performance which is served by one to another (Kotler, 1991). Service is the work done by an individual upon the requirement or needs from someone else (Juran, 1986). Quality referring the standard of the service delivering or excellent ways that service was delivers toward the targeted individuals (Kotler, 1991).

According to Lewis and Boom (1983) indicated that service quality have interrelation between performance of the operation in the hotel and service expectations from the guests. The hotel perform excellent in the operation which exceeded form customer’s expectation, the guest will rank the service quality of the hotel positively with no regard. For example, in-house guests most properly would measure and judge the service quality based on service provider, before, during and post process of services delivering compare with customer’s own expectations. However, there is different opinion whereby the service quality of the hospitality sector must included ten elements which is competence, courtesy, credibility, security, access, communication, understanding, tangibles, reliability, and responsiveness (Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry, 1985).

On the other hand, Dubé et al. (1994) argue that customers also look significant into service attributes such as food quality, menu variety, waiting time, server performance, and atmosphere. Besides staying in the hotel, guest will need foods and beverages. Once the guest ordered the dishes, the employees have delivered the request on time to prevent complaining from the guest. Service quality should more emphasize on service quality of employee which involve basic skills, technical skill, communication skill, interpersonal skill, thinking skill, and personal quality (Austin, 1995). According to Dubé et al. (1994) customer satisfaction is an indirect way to measure quality of service. Identify and understand the customer satisfaction can help to improve the service quality of hotel. So that, the customers have measure about staff performance, communication, interpersonal skill and hygiene issue.

On the other hand, Zeithaml and Bitner (2000) declared that element of service quality whereby the managements need to focus on five basic elements which is tangibles, reliability, assurance, empathy, and responsiveness. For example, front-line employees have a great responsible in assisting guests when the customers face problem by provide reliability, accurately and updated information regarding the new hotel’s services and product availability. As the result, the guests would not feel neglected by the employees or situation like unhappy staying in the hotel for the whole trip. There are another opinion stated that hotel able to provide excellent service quality toward the customers by understanding what the customer needed from the service or product offered (Peters, 1999). The management should record, design the detailed specification on managing the service delivering process so that the customers notice about the service delivered was excellent and suit the preferences (Chowdhary and Prakash, 2007). Service quality does not exist outside of the service outlets, the customers are the individuals that rank the level of the service quality of a hotel’s operation (Peters, 1999).

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Methology

Literature review was conducted to provide theoretical and conceptual framework which act as guidance. Most of the literature or journals are primarily looking into the field of hospitality management, service quality, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty as keyword for easily to allocate suitable sources for literature review. All informative resources are retrieved from high reliable sites such as Emerald and Proquest.

Research method

This questionnaire is to investigate the restaurant concept and service quality in the Kampar restaurant. In the restaurant concept, it gathered information about type of restaurant you more prefer to dine-in daily (fast food restaurant, casual dining, family restaurant, café or other) and kinds of elements of the restaurant concept. It use to know Kampar peoples more likely what type restaurant and to understand customers view for the variety element for strongly agree to strongly disagree.

In the part of service quality, the questionnaire has design to know about many kind of element of the service quality are most important for the restaurant. Moreover, each of type service quality will design out to more deep clearly to understand what service quality need to improvement or have reach customers expectation and to examine customers are strongly agree or strongly disagree. In the last part is gathered information about demographics. This is collected response’s gender, age, education level, and ethnics group. It was let’s to know target market in the Kampar area.

There are two different methods for analyses interpret and tabulation of the data received from the questionnaires survey which is quantitative and qualitative method. Quantitative techniques are the method using numerical analysis the data collection, modeling the data and evaluating the results. Qualitative technique is more recording the ideals and impressions about the emerging data patterns through interview the respondents, uses other researcher’s journal as references and gather facts from variety reliable sources to interpret the result. Quantitative analysis allows researcher to test specific hypotheses of the research topic, in contrast to qualitative research, more toward on exploratory. I decided to use quantitative techniques to interpret the data which more easy from qualitative technique.

Research findings

In this research, 10 questions are designed for evaluate the restaurant concept and 9 questions are designed for evaluate the service quality in Kampar. Of the 52 respondents, the average age of the respondents in this study was between about 19-30 years old. A Majority of ethnic groups more were Chinese and 54 percent were female. So, another 46 percent were male.

The data was collected from the customers and employees of the A’ Famosa Resort located in Melaka. Participants of this study were customers and employees from particular resort. In total 50 respondents which 25 individuals are customers and 25 individuals are employees of the hotel. There is total composition of 7 questionnaire design created online.

Pilot test

Before send the actual questionnaires survey, a simple pilot test of the questionnaires was given to selected respondent. At the initial stage, a few of questions was created to perform online questionnaires survey so that any positive or negative feedback can be collect from the targeted respondent. Sometimes, during forming the questionnaires process might not notice about the error that had been made or questions formed are out the research objectives and literature review. Through pilot test, any weakness and error of questions design can be identify immediately and make correction in order to construct better than the initial questionnaires survey. The first feedback was not too impressive, the respondent comment that the structure of the question is too complicated. The respondent had difficulty in answering the questionnaires design which the question cause confusing and misleading. The respondents had proposed a few suggestions to solve the errors that occur in the questionnaires design. After correction action taken, the second questionnaires sheet whereby the questions structure is much more simplify, direct to the question, easily to understand and did not cause misleading.

Limitation

Limited time was allocated to complete the research assignment. Each student only given 10 weeks duration to complete whole research project, this eventually become disadvantages for the individual assignment. The research assignment require time to collect sufficient information and data analysis for the questionnaires, with limited time period the result produced might not be very accurate and precisely. Besides that, the individual research project is not only one assignment in the semester; there is also other subjects’ assignment need to submit before the due date. Although time management is very important, the student must wisely use the free period and allocate time for each assignment. However, the individual unable to give 100 percentages focus and concentrate on the research project. The student easily get tired, exhausted and face tension at the same time in completing the assignment within the time frame given, as the result the quality of the completed research project will be affected. The research project’s quality might not in excellent form and unable to notice the minor error that had been made.

Coverage area for the questionnaires survey is small. The actual aim to spread the questionnaires into several tourism hot spot where many hotels allocated in the few state of Malaysia such as Pulau Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Melaka, Cameron Highland and others in order to collect different opinions from the locals and to produce more intensive results. Limited time available and the hotels busy handle in the operation site, the questionnaires managed collected only from one of the targeted destination. Other hotels did not perform full cooperation with the researcher did not make any respondent toward the questionnaires that send through e-mail. The data analysis might result one sided opinions regarding the limited coverage area.

Besides that, previous research method is used the Microsoft Excel to interpret the data. This semester, the Programme Supervisor of Hospitality Management Mr. Lim Kuang Long asks the students use SPSS software for analysis data. Although the software is ease to use, more accurate and precisely compare to Microsoft Excel, the software requirement time to masteries. We follow the handout guideline given to avoid make mistakes.

Future direction

This is the second time doing research project, although the first time was a group research project. Group research project will more easily whereby the group members divided same amount of workload and uses the strength of each individual editing, analysis and concentrate on the part they in charges to produce excellent result. This time, the lecturer upgraded the challenges of the research project whereby each student must conduct their own research topic that related to hospitality industry. Through the individual research assignment, I learn to perform individually from the beginning until end of the research project. All the weakness part of the project or any problem occurs in the research must be solved by individual. Regardless the different research topics, we students are helping each other, spot the error that had been made and recommend solution toward the weakness area. Once completion of the research project, I gained more experience in dealing weak part of the research project and increases confident level in undergo research project. I hope the experience of doing research project will help me when proceed to higher education level or in the future career.

 

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