Paper I: The overall objectives of this research paper are to analyse previous studies and to review the literature regarding service quality improvement in the hotel industry from various kinds of studies and sources in order to ascertain the following things: service quality and its determinants, service quality model, quality improvement model, the approaches for service quality improvement, the factors affecting service quality improvement, and the critical success factors as well as the barriers to success for service quality improvement. These objectives will lead to a better understanding of the various aspects of service quality improvement in the hotel industry. This is one of three research papers on the topic and can be used as a knowledge base for Research Paper II and Research Paper III. / Paper II: At present, hotels in Thailand have been experiencing dramatic changes, leading hotel practitioners to pay attention to service quality improvement. Empirical research, using in-depth face-to-face interviews, has been conducted to examine service quality improvement in the Thai hotel industry. Thirty hoteliers were recruited from five-star hotels in Bangkok, Thailand- Thai hotel chains and international hotel chains- to find out their problems in customer service, their interest in it, what they were doing about it, their critical success factors, barriers to success, what should be done to overcome these problems and what more could be done to continue to improve service quality. Respondents were top and middle management because they work directly within the hotel in order to affect overall service quality. / Though service quality improvement initiatives in the Thai hotel industry are successful to some extent according to respondents' views, the findings, however, indicate hotels in Thailand might not exactly understand their problems or misallocated their resources to solve the problems. Therefore, hotels have to increasingly solve customer service problems, improve quality initiatives, and create more quality programs based on present experiences and expertise. This could suggest that hotels should place more resources in the improvement of communication and customer expectation studies as major aspects in the future. / Paper III: The effective system for service quality improvement in the Thai hotel industry that is proposed in Research Paper III was developed from the literature review and the empirical findings from the second research study together with the third research study. This system will be used as a framework to present the implications of service quality improvement in the Thai hotel industry for hotel practitioners to build upon and improve their competitive edge in order to maintain customer satisfaction. The internal factors in this system are composed of management, staff, communication, work process, and hotel facility and provided service, due to their mutual benefit and support of each other. Other issues are consumer factors, external factors, service quality measurement and the approaches for service quality improvement, service quality targets and feedback that hotel practitioners should focus on. Furthermore, it has found that the starting point to improving service quality is that hotels need to have an in-depth understanding of factors influencing perceived service quality in their hotels. Then, the hotels need to provide proper techniques for improving service quality. / This paper enables hoteliers to apply the practical implications proposed for their hotels to build and improve their service quality. Nevertheless, these implications will be effective only if all staff and management act together. Service quality improvement requires long-term commitment, total involvement from staff and management, and continuous improvement. The research topic should be examined in other countries to improve this proposed system for its practicability and to see if it is general enough to apply in other situations outside of Thailand. / Thesis (DBA(DoctorateofBusinessAdministration))--University of South Australia, 2005
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/267438 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Tuntirattanasoontorn, Nida |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | copyright under review |
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