To study the importance of service quality in five-star hotels in Malta from a conceptual standpoint and the implementation of holistic service quality

Abstract

The number of tourists visiting Malta has been on the increase for the past five years. Therefore, the level of service quality offered in all hotels should be of a high level in order to provide the best service possible. Moreover, such hotels should have patrons’ best interest at heart. Having a high level of service quality in the hotel industry is of utmost importance. This will aid in achieving customer satisfaction. Having a good understating of the customer offers a twofold benefit- it will help in gaining a competitive advantage over other hotels and it will also ensure customer credence. Therefore, service quality is considered as a fundamental concept and a vital success factor within the hotel industry. The main aim of this research is it to examine whether tourists staying in local five-star hotels are satisfied with the level of service offered. To achieve the gap scores between expectations and perceptions of tourists, 130 questionnaires which adopted the SERVQUAL model developed by Parasuraman et al. were distributed amongst tourists staying in all five-star hotels in Malta. A research hypothesis was also determined in order to examine whether tourists are/ are not satisfied with the level of service being offered in local five-star hotels. In this research one will be able to understand that tourists staying in local fivestar hotels during the period of February and March 2018 were not fully satisfied with the level of service offered due to the fact that the majority of the dimensions resulted in a negative gap score. The findings were discussed, limitations which emerged during this research were highlighted and a number of recommendations on how to improve the level of service in local five-star hotels were also discussed.