Analysis of tangible and intangible hotel service quality components

Abstract

The issue of service quality is one of the essential areas of marketing theory and practice, as high quality can lead to customer satisfaction and loyalty, i.e. successful business results. It is vital for any company, especially in services sector, to understand and grasp the consumers' expectations and perceptions pertaining to the broad range of factors affecting consumers' evaluation of services, their satisfaction and loyalty. Hospitality is a service sector where the significance of these elements grows exponentially. The aim of this study is to identify the significance of individual quality components in hospitality industry. The questionnaire used for gathering data comprised 19 tangible and 14 intangible attributes of service quality, which the respondents rated on a five-degree scale. The analysis also identified the factorial structure of the tangible and intangible elements of hotel service. The paper aims to contribute to the existing literature by pointing to the significance of tangible and intangible components of service quality. A very small number of studies conducted in hospitality and hotel management identify the sub-factors within these two dimensions of service quality. The paper also provides useful managerial implications. The obtained results help managers in hospitality to establish the service offers that consumers find the most important when choosing a given hotel.

Keywords

• service quality
• tangibility
• intangibility
• consumers
• hospitality sector
• customers
• satisfaction
• etc