Exploring hotel internal service chains: a theoretical approach

Quality has been historically viewed by hospitality organisations in terms of product and service efficiency. The emergence of total quality management in the 1980s has forced a significant number of them to move away from the idea of efficiency and put more emphasis on customer needs. Such culture should give equal emphasis on the internal dynamics of the organisation, recognising that, in order for a hospitality organisation to be truly effective, each department within the hotel should treat the recipients of their output as an internal customer and strive to provide high quality outputs for them. This will consequently lead to a high level of quality built into the service offered to the external customer. While considerable research has been conducted in the hospitality industry focusing on (external) service encounters and external customer satisfaction, internal service encounters and internal customer satisfaction have received very little attention. This article explores from a theoretical perspective, the internal service encounters that take place in a hotel and to set a framework of investigation for future empirical research.