EVALUATING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SERVICE QUALITY IN DIFFERENT HOTELS OF SYDNEY

Satisfied customers and quality services serve as a competitive advantage over a company’s competitors. Australia has a strong economy that has thrived through the service delivery industry; the focus has been on the quality of services given to customers. Sydney is well known as a destination for local service industry since it is a tourist destination site and has a large number of hotels. As hospitality is a trivial aspect of Sydney, this paper will explore the quality service provided by the Sydney hotel sector. Hotels play significant roles in providing some services besides accommodation. A major challenge in most of these hotels can redesign and rebrand and at the same time reduce the costs to make it more affordable for customers.

It is trivial for the management of these hotels to have an excellent understanding of the market within which they operate. The reviews done by their customers on their evaluation of the hotel’s facilities and services should be taken into account not only by the management but for measurement of service quality. The principal actors in this analysis and evaluation are the employees, the customers of various hotels. A research done in the CBD of Sydney, Australia will be included in this paper in an attempt to find out customer needs/ expectations and the various relationships related to service quality. Are there aspects of the service provided by these hotels that can be modified or improved through teaching and learning? Using questionnaires and interviews, the respondents showed some differing views on service delivery.

Managers displayed a clear understanding of what the needs and expectations of the customers are but expressed some the challenges that were related to meeting them or not being able to meet some of them. Using the various interviews an analysis of what customers look for when going to the different hotels in Sydney, various customer preferences were established. The number of relationships that were developed using these finding includes correlations between service quality and customer expectations, service quality and customer satisfaction, service quality and customer loyalty also known as retention and service quality and price. Through this findings, management can be able to assess the areas that require more resources than others, and an improvement of the human resource so that there is a better contact of the hotel management and its staff with the customers.

A customer whose needs and expectations are met happy, but one whose expectations are surpassed becomes extremely satisfied. It is essential to evaluate customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction since the increased consumption is due to the increased need by customers to have their needs met. Some hotel guests have travelled all over the world and therefore expect a high quality of facilities and services offered. The competitiveness in the hotel industry is on the increase with the growing need to provide customers with superior services, loyalty programs that are a depiction of the hotel’s value and better facilities (Evans et al, 2012). Once some of the expectations of customers are surpassed by a particular hotel, they become requirements that customers look for when evaluating and choosing hotels.

This does not just happen overnight; it requires consistent and constant dedication to delivering quality service. Customer satisfaction can be explained as customer contentment and happiness brought by a feeling of comfort, feeling welcomed, relaxed, pampered. These feelings steer a customer towards having a repetitive behavior of wanting to experience that again. Hotels in Sydney need to come up with a program for quality service delivery which will not only keep the customer satisfied and loyal but will provide subsidized prices for them and ensure employee morale and a boost for the hotels’ images (Liu et al, 2013). The last correlation is between service quality and price/value. It is essential for these hotels to adequately price services but also make them affordable to their customers.

However, the relationship between the quality of service and the price is still a debate with there is a direct relation or other directions have to come into play. Hotels in Sydney need to keep a balance between customers who want affordable services and those that are willing to pay the price tagged to what they consider quality services that come with comfort, pampering, the feeling of belonging and being welcomed. The role of customer satisfaction is to maintain loyal customers and to be able to ensure they retain their visits due to the ultimate customer experience they get. References Enz, CA 2010, Hospitality Strategic Management: Concepts and Cases, 2nd edn, Hoboken, NJ : Wiley   Evans, N. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 34, 359-371.