Benchmarking the quality of hotel services: managerial perspectives

With escalating competition in the hotel industry, a growing number of hotels have considered service quality their top priority in maintaining competitiveness. To maintain competitiveness, the hotel management often needs to develop reliable service quality standards. Perhaps one of the best ways of developing such standards is to compare the hotel’s service performance with that of the service leader and reassess its service performance continuously through competitive benchmarking. In an effort to establish practical guidelines for competitive benchmarking, proposes the use of an analytic hierarchy process and a competitive gap analysis. These methods can help the hotel manager formulate viable service improvement strategies in the increasingly competitive hotel industry. Illustrates the usefulness of the proposed benchmarking methodology using the case of Korean luxury hotels.