Methodologies for innovation and improvement of services in tourism

Travel organisations, as travel agencies, tour operators, hotels, etc. focus their research too much on measuring service quality level and identifying errors. This strategy results in incremental improvements. This paper will focus more on how to improve the service by using strategies that further both incremental and innovative improvements of service. The paper demonstrates that an importance‐performance survey combined with service blueprinting and benchmarking is a useful strategy to improve and innovate service. To understand this strategy a quality management model that integrates incremental and fundamental (innovative) service improvements is presented.