Preface
The service quality and customer satisfaction have been widely recognized as the key influences in the formation of repurchased intention and price acceptability in the service environment, especially in the hotel industry.
A great deal of d...
Preface
The service quality and customer satisfaction have been widely recognized as the key influences in the formation of repurchased intention and price acceptability in the service environment, especially in the hotel industry.
A great deal of discussion has occurred within the service literature regarding the appropriate causal relationship between service quality and customer satisfacation with regard to their influence to repurchase intention, however, few empirical research on the effects of customer satisfaction and repurchase intention to the price acceptability in the hotel business were performed. This empirical research hopes to be contributed to these discussions by demonstranting that, for the hotel service, customer satisfaction is being conceptualized as the key factor acting to impact customer's purchase behavior to increase influence on not only the repurchase intention but the price acceptability.
The purpose of the Research
This reasearch has three purposes : first, to point out the underlying major factors of the hotel service quality and the evaluation criterial of consumer, second, to ensure and support the previous studies on the influences among the hotel service quality level, customer satisfaction, perceived value of service offered and repurchase intention, third, to estimate the causal influences between the research variables such as customer satisfaction, repurchase intention and price acceptability respectively in the hotel service area.
Research Methods
The literactural studies were performed to define the concept of the research variables and to decide the measuring and analyzing methods for them such as evaluation of service quality, customer satisfaction, percieved value of the service offered, repurchase intention and price acceptability, and also to build the research model and hypotheses.
20 evaluatio criteria of the service quality were selected form various previous articles regarding the quality evaluation factors in service business, and were verified to use as measuringtools in this research. Also questionnaire with 54 five-scaled measures were presented to the 2,100 members who held the special benefit membership cards in the research objective hotel, a medium-sized first-grade one, located in Taejon, and 212 resonses were analyzed via the SPSSWIN 6.0 version.
Major Findings
1. Six major factors of hotel service quality were abstracted by the factor analysis as:
- politeness of the employees
- credibility and reliability of the hotel
- cleanliness and amenity of the hotel
- readiness to offering the services
- effective utility of the services offered
- convenience of the service facilities
These six factors are recommending to concentrate all of core competence of the hotel management to pull up the customers satisfaction level.
2. Six hypotheses based on below causal relation model were proven as acceptable by the correlation and the regression analysis.
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- The Hotel Service Quality has positive and strong influence (regression coefficient shows the range from .7813 to .8829 at the significance level of .01) to the Customer Satisfaction.
- The Customer Satisfaction has positive and comparatively strong influence (regression coeffectient shows the range form .5085 to .6668 at the significance level of .01) to the Repurchase Intention.
- The Customer Satisfaction has positive but comparatively weak influence (regression coefficient shows the range from .1546 to .3582 at the significance level of .05) to the Price Acceptability.
- The Perceived Vaule of the Service Offered has positive and comparatively strong infulence (regression coeffieicent shows .6343 at the significance level of .01) to the Repurchase Intention.
- The Repurchase Intention has positive but comparatively weak influence (regression coefficient shows the range from .1834 tp .3833 at the significance level of .01) to the Price Acceptability.
- The Price Acceptability has positive but comparatively weak influence (regression coefficient shows the range from .2425 to .4887 at the significace level of .01) to the Repurchase Intention.
Conculsion and Managerial Implications
In the hotel service industry, service quality is acting as one of antecedent factors to customer satisfaction which affects positively and strongly to repurchase intention. Also customer's perceived service value influececs positively and strongly to repurchase intention while coustomer satisfaction and repurchase intention affect positively bt somewhat weakly to price acceptability respectively.
Therefore, to creat and keep repeat guests to increase sales revenue, the hotel management needs to give a keen effort to meet the service quality requirement focusing on the six major factors of the service quality above-mentioned so that customer satisfaction level improves to intend to repurchase.
Limitations and Further Research
While the outcome of the research reported in this article seems to be somewhat meaningful, generalizing the results and findings may need careful cosideration due to the limitations : measurement scales for the research variables were too simply-dimensional to have high reliability level, and mail survey was performed to the very limited population, membership card holders, not to general customers of the hotel randomly selected.
Further researches are proposed to execute two subjects : first, to find out the strategies to increase price acceptability level which may act one of the constraint conditions to increase repurchase intention, second, to develop accurate and reliable multiple-items of the measurement for research variables such as the customer satisfaction, repurchase intention and price acceptability.