In the past, the hotel was the simple destination only for resting or dining. But as hotel is getting popular for its upscale facilities and quality service, people gathers in hotels for various purposes. As the standard of living gets higher, custome...
In the past, the hotel was the simple destination only for resting or dining. But as hotel is getting popular for its upscale facilities and quality service, people gathers in hotels for various purposes. As the standard of living gets higher, customers who have desire for various cultural & social experience visit hotels with higher expectations.
Among all services provided by hotels, the importance of banquet business is getting emphasized. The banquet is like the essence of the quality food and beverage, ability of event planning and attractive physical attributes and it becomes one of the important revenue centers. Also, by nature of the operation, banquets can contribute to generation of extra revenue and positive influence on other operations.
In order to meet or exceed guest' expectation, hotels make diversified efforts to attract clients for banquet events. However, although many hotels are aware of the importance of banquets, sometimes they tend to focus on inducing events itself as a revenue aspect, rather than obtain guests' satisfaction by quality service provided through the process or follow ups of finished events to achieve repeated business.
Service providers need to assure that 'Guest satisfaction' cannot be acquired by events themselves, and recognize the quality service through whole process, from reservation to follow-ups after functions.
The banquet service process consists of several steps as follows; Reservation - Confirmation - Preparation - Operational service on the date of event - Follow ups after the function. This study attempts to highlight the nature and magnitude of the impact of the quality service on each stages and propose a systemic solution to enhance guest satisfaction and draw intention of revisit.
A factor and regression analysis have been conducted based on the survey to the customers who had experience to host banquet events at 5-star hotels in Seoul. Through the empirical research, those results were obtained;
Firstly, all stages through the banquet service process have positive influence on the guest satisfaction. In other words, the outcome that is the successful function is not the only one factor which affects guest satisfaction, but the factor that customers start to notice the level of service from the reservation stage to the follow up after functions.
Secondly, the survey shows that the most influential stages on customer satisfaction is Operational service on the event day stage. Since it is the guest's main purpose of using the hotel paying guest's money, effort and time and visitor's satisfaction is also considered by organizer at this stage, fully understanding of the event and perfect preparation are required. Since satisfied guest has more possibility to have intention of the revisit, hotel management should pay more attention to these area not to loose repeat guest and business.
The suggestive points of this study is to show the cooperation of the involved departments and communication among them are the crucial to make perfect banquet to achieve guest satisfaction.
Also, it suggests further studies related to the expenses guests pays and survey conducted with more detailed segmentation by characteristics of hotels and functions.