Service Quality In The Hotel Industry

Service Quality and the Effect of Image between Customer Satisfaction prespective and Loyalty in the Malaysian Hotel Industry.

Fakhrul Na’im Bin Aiyub

Faculty Culinary And Tourism, Unitar International University Malaysia

Abstract

Service quality is vital to the success of any service organization. The rapid growth of the Malaysian hotel industry in the 2000’s forced hotel operators to seriously recognize the importance of service improvement in order to gain competitive advantage. This study aims to examine the impact of service quality on customer satisfaction, and how customer satisfaction subsequently affects customer loyalty in the hotel industry in Malaysia. This study also investigates the mediating effect of corporate image on

According to Antony et al. (2004), the concept of service quality has gained increasing popularity since its incep-tion in the late 1970s. Due to its significant impact on business performance, cost sav-ing, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and profitability; service quality has become a main area of attention among practitioners, managers and researchers (Seth et al. 2005). Service quality is consumers’ judgment of the excellence and superiority of the service en-counter (Zeithaml and Bitner 2003). In the hotel industry, perceptions of service quality are formed when guests experience feelings and attitudes during their hotel stay. In other words, guests will have certain perceptions of the hotel service quality depending on the services offered to them or the experiences they have undergone (Abbasi et al. 2010; Shahin and Dabestani 2010). Evaluating cus-tomers’ perception and satisfaction regarding service quality is widely acknowledged as being an effective strategy to boost profit-ability in the hospitality industry. The hotel industry, which has a high level of customer contact is not an exception to this observation (Claver et al. 2006; Soutar

This study is explanatory in nature because it seeks to examine the impact of service quality on customer satisfaction, and how customer satisfaction subsequently affects customer loyalty in the hotel industry in Malaysia. This study also investigates the effect of hotel image on the relationship between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

In order to enhance the validity of questionnaires, items and scales in the questionnaire were sourced from ex-isting literature. Additional attempts were made to ensure the context of the literature was related to service quality, customer satisfaction, corporate im-age, and customer loyalty in the hotel indus-try that are similar with the context of this study.

A systematic sampling approach was adopted in this study. The sampling units were 500 guests who stayed overnight at the hotels in Malaysia during the survey period. The data were collected through self-administered questionnaire, including multiple scales of each variable and some demographic enquiries. Questionnaires were dis-tributed to every tenth traveller passing through the security entrance airport. In order to collect the data required for the purpose of this study, a screening question was asked to ensure the respondents had stayed at least one night at a hotel