African Journal of Hospitality, Tourism and Leisure (Jan 2015)
An assessment of customer satisfaction and service quality: the case of hotels in East London, South Africa
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine hotel guest comment cards (GCCs) and customer satisfaction management schemes in hotels of East London. The findings indicate that hotel employees do not need additional training in order to motivate their guests to complete GCCs. Therefore, GCCs provide information relevant to the individual hotel in the chain and they are used as a tool for benchmarking and maintaining consistency across hotels. This study can be of great use to hotel managers in providing a direction on how to conduct and modify the existing practice of measuring customer satisfaction in hotels. Findings further indicate that in most hotels GCCs can be found in a folder on a room table and are not distributed randomly. Guests can complete GCCs during their stay at the hotel. It can be concluded that the efficiency of customer satisfaction measurement with GCCs depends on the measurement methodology. It is clear that guests should be additionally motivated and that GCCs should be designed following a scientific approach with a greater impact.
