Dynamic benchmarking of hotel service quality

Total customer satisfaction is one of the most important strategic weapons of best‐practice hotel organizations. However, hotel organizations cannot achieve total customer satisfaction without gaining the knowledge of a hotel’s competitive position in the changing marketplace and realizing the opportunity of continuous service improvement. With this in mind, this paper develops a set of service benchmarks that help hotel managers monitor their service delivery process, identify performance gaps, and take corrective action. In particular, we propose dynamic benchmarking based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) that goes beyond traditional service performance measures. Based on the longitudinal surveys of customers who have stayed at first‐class hotels in Korea, this paper illustrates the usefulness of dynamic benchmarking for continuous service improvement.

[1]  A. Parasuraman,et al.  Quality counts in services, too , 1985 .

[2]  Richard C. Morey,et al.  Evaluating a hotel GM's performance , 1995 .

[3]  Fatemeh Zahedi,et al.  The Analytic Hierarchy Process—A Survey of the Method and its Applications , 1986 .

[4]  Ernest R. Cadotte,et al.  Key Factors in Guest Satisfaction , 1988 .

[5]  Timothy R. Furey Benchmarking: The key to developing competitive advantage in mature markets , 1987 .

[6]  Hokey Min,et al.  Competitive benchmarking of Korean luxury hotels using the analytic hierarchy process and competitive gap analysis , 1996 .

[7]  Robert C. Lewis,et al.  The measurement of gaps in the quality of hotel services. , 1987 .

[8]  Robert C. Camp,et al.  Benchmarking: The Search for Industry Best Practices That Lead to Superior Performance , 1989 .

[9]  Thomas L. Saaty,et al.  Marketing Applications of the Analytic Hierarchy Process , 1980 .

[10]  R. C. Morey,et al.  Evaluating a hotel GM's performance A case study in benchmarking , 2003 .

[11]  Hokey Min,et al.  Benchmarking the quality of hotel services: managerial perspectives , 1997 .

[12]  T. Saaty,et al.  The Analytic Hierarchy Process , 1985 .

[13]  Thomas L. Saaty,et al.  Decision making for leaders , 1985, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.

[14]  V. Grover,et al.  An assessment of survey research in POM: from constructs to theory , 1998 .

[15]  Paul A. Phillips,et al.  Benchmarking to improve the strategic planning process in the hotel sector. , 1998 .