Using integrated quality assessment for hotel service quality

In the age of growing foreign tourism, providing excellent quality service at hotels is increasingly more important. Service quality and customer satisfaction have gradually been recognized as key factors used to gain competitive advantage and customer retention. Most companies conducted satisfaction surveys of their customers, with a view of using analysed results to identify attributes of potential improvement. However, this kind improvement decisions on the attributes with a lower satisfaction level needs not to be appropriated. Thus, to achieve higher levels of overall satisfaction with the hotel experience, this study combined four simple methods, including Kano’s model, refined Kano’s model, Importance-Satisfaction model, and the Improvement index, to evaluate two types of hotels. The integrated approach of service quality measurement is based on the importance and satisfaction survey of the quality attributes. The survey, with 24 attributes and service items, were administrated to a random sample of 400 customers at one business hotel and one resort hotel in Taiwan. The strategies of these two kinds of hotels were compared and discussed in this study. On the basis of the key quality attributes identified by employing the integrated approach, which are significantly different from those identified on the basis of a simple satisfaction survey, hotels can make appropriate decisions on specific areas for improvement to further enhance the hotel service quality in Taiwan.     

Contingent Employment Relationships Between Tour Guides and Tour Operators in Ecuador: Human Resource Management Practices and Attitudinal Outcomes

This study examines a unique contingent employment relationship—that between tour guides and tour operators in Ecuador. Linkages among tour operators’ HR practices, interactions between operations managers and tour guides, and the tour guides’ attitudes toward both the tour operator and the ultimate tourist-client are investigated. Tour guides are found to exhibit dual commitments to both operators and tourist-clients. Affective commitment to the tour operators was found to partially mediate the relationship between organizational entry HR practices, compensation related HR practices, operations manager interactions, and tour guides’ commitment to the tourist-client, suggesting that tour guides’ perceptions about the tour operator may affect their ultimate customer service delivery. Satisfaction with tips was more directly related to commitment to the tourist-client, as was the interaction of pay administration satisfaction and tip satisfaction, supporting the notion that contingent pay beyond base pay provided by the tour operator and its delivery may impact tour guides’ motivation to provide quality service to the end client. Practical implications for the tour operators, and tourism ministries are offered.     

Service quality of travel agents in Turkey

Customer satisfaction is an important measure of service quality in travel agents. Customers’ perceptions about agents seem to have been largely ignored by agent management in developing countries. The assessment of service quality provides an important feedback for agents to assess and improve its service to its customers. The aim of this study is to develop a reliable and valid instrument measure customer satisfaction in travel agents. A questionnaire to measure the service quality of travel agents was used and a total of 217 customers in Turkey were interviewed. Factor analysis was utilized to determine the factor structure. The instrument of the customer satisfaction developed in this study provides insights to the researches who study the improvement of customer satisfaction with service quality of travel agents and decision markers.     

我国服务贸易现状及竞争力研究

伴随着经济全球化与国际经济分工的发展,服务业已成为全球第一大产业,服务业发展水平成为衡量一个国家或地区生产社会化程度和市场经济发展水平的重要标志。与服务业相适应的国际服务贸易发展也十分迅速并已经成为一个国家对外开放的窗口和渠道,成为衡量一个国家整体水平的重要指标并正逐渐成为全球经济发展与竞争的重点。     

A Study on the application of 6-Sigma on the enhancement of service quality of fitness club

The service industry plays an essential role in economic globalization and a determining factor in strengthening industry’s competitiveness. Targeting fitness industry, this study intends to explore ways to minimize customer complaints, understand customer expectation, and enhance service quality by applying the five steps of 6-Sigma: (1) Definition; (2) Measurement; (3) Analysis; (4) Improvement; and (5) Control, to effectively solve the root causes of customer complaints, raise customer satisfaction and minimize possible future complaints.     

Comparing the main effects and moderating effects of education among three models in IT service: a quantitative approach

This study examines the formation of relationship quality and loyalty for an ISP (Internet service provider). Three conceptual models are tested for comparison. In the models, relational selling behavior, network quality, and service recovery indirectly influence loyalty with an ISP through the mediation of relationship quality. That is, in model 1, relationship quality is examined as a single construct, rather than the second-order construct comprising satisfaction and trust in model 2. In model 3, satisfaction and trust are examined as two different constructs. Customer education moderates several paths of the three models. The moderating effects are simultaneously examined using data from customers of a Taiwan’s leading ISP. The test results indicate that the influence of satisfaction on loyalty and that of network quality on satisfaction are stronger for low education customers than high education customers, while the influence of trust on loyalty and that of network quality on trust are stronger for high education customers than low education customers. Furthermore, the influences of relational selling behavior and service recovery on satisfaction and trust are similar for both high education customers and low education customers. Implications of the empirical findings are also discussed.     

The Relationship Among Union Membership, Facets of Satisfaction and Intent to Leave: Further Evidence on the Voice Face of Unions

This study examined the impact of union membership on employees’ intent to leave their jobs across a number of facets of satisfaction, as a further test of unions’ voice face. Among the findings were that there were significant relationships between job, compensation, benefits, working conditions, and immediate supervisor satisfaction and intent to leave one’s job for nonunion employees. In contrast, only the relationship between job satisfaction and intent to leave was significant for union employees. Finally, over the facets of satisfaction where one would expect unions to have the most influence, the relationship between intent to leave one’s job and satisfaction was greater for nonunion employees than for union employees. These results provide a great deal of support for the effect of unions’ voice face.

The concept study of Servqual method’s gap

The methodology of conduct, presented in this publication, allows conducting the study of clients’ satisfaction of services in a complex manner and at the same time, it allows getting to know all problems appearing in the process of their provision. Gap no 5 expresses a general client’s perception of services and allow defining his satisfaction. Gap 4 allows defining in what range the organization provides clients with false and distorted information in its promotion and advertising materials, which in consequence influence on their satisfaction. The result from gap no 4 can be used when planning promotion campaign. Gap no 2 and 3 allow defining if the organization is realizing the planned strategy of quality. It allows defining which employees provide services of a low quality and then by means of the application the appropriate motivation tools it allow to cut it out. Finally, gap no 1 which allow defining problems connected with marketing communication. It allows finding client’s needs which organization does not know and which should be included in its strategy.     

On the performance of voting systems in spatial voting simulations

We study the performance of voting systems in terms of minimizing the overall social disutility of making a collective choice in an univariate voting space with ideological voting and perfect information. In order to obtain a distribution of the performance indicator for each of the 12 systems chosen for this study—Baldwin’s Method, Black’s Method, The Borda Count, Bucklin’s Grand Junction System, Coombs’ Method, Dodgson’s System, Instant Run-Off Voting, Plurality, Simpson’s MinMax, Tideman’s Ranked Pairs, Schulze’s Beatpath Method, and Two-Round Majority—we simulate elections using an Agent-Based Computational approach under several different distributions for voters and candidates positioning, with up to 15 available candidates. At each iteration, voters generate complete and strict ordinal utility functions over the set of available candidates, based on which each voting system computes a winner. We define the performance of a system in terms of its capability of choosing among the available candidates the one that minimizes aggregate voter disutility. As expected, the results show an overall dominance of Condorcet completion methods over the traditional and more widely used voting systems, regardless of the distributions of voter and candidate positions.     

Value-creating functions,satisfaction and loyalty in business markets: a categorical variable approach using a robust methodology under structural equation modeling

This paper studies the effect of the value-creating functions on satisfaction and loyalty in business markets. The conceptual framework that depicts a direct effect of the manufacturer’s value-creating functions on the distributor’s satisfaction and loyalty also considers the existence of quadratic effects between satisfaction and loyalty. We used polychoric correlations (Br J Math Stat Psychol 48:339–358, 1995), together with a robust methodological approach, to analyze categorical variables under structural equation modeling (SEM) in EQS. The empirical results are based on a sample of 181 manufacturing companies located in Spain. By using the aforementioned efficient analytical procedure, the results provide strong empirical support that value creation, understood from a functionalist perspective, is an antecedent of satisfaction and loyalty in business-to-business contexts. Distributor satisfaction is significantly affected by the benefit, volume, and safeguard functions, and the indirect value-creating functions performed by the manufacturer. Distributor loyalty is directly influenced by the indirect value-creating functions, but there is no confirmation that the benefit, volume, and safeguard functions do so. Finally, distributor satisfaction does not exert any significant quadratic effect on distributor loyalty but it has a direct linear effect on that variable.     

Apply 6-sigma methodology in measuring the competition quality of satisfaction performance—an example of ISP Industry

At present time the ISP (Internet Service Provider) already make a great impact to the human life as well as the economic society, everything has a close relation with the internet service and due to the fast development of information technology further lower the cost of ISP and improved the service speed as well as its quality. All of this make the customer layer of ISP more popular than before and thus bring up the fierce competition in this industry. Due to the entry barrier of high investment and high technology of ISP industry it has become as a monopoly market and the monopoly market is very respect the competition and cooperation relationship with competitors. Besides, most of the relevant literature in the past is focus on the measurement and analysis of customer to the self-company and few of them mention how to include the satisfaction of competitor’s customer into measurement and analysis. As golden strategy stated in the Sun-Tze Strategic: “Know yourself and know your competitor well, winning every war.” we must consider the strength, weakness, opportunity and threat on customer satisfaction of your company and competitors. Base on the above motivation, this article will apply the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) methodology of 6-Sigma, focus on the viewpoint of customer satisfaction of ISP industry. At first we utilize the 5 equal scale measurement define the network quality item of ISP, which provided by the self-company and competitors. And measuring the degree of “satisfaction” and “importance” of these quality items, then use the performance evaluation matrix and strength and weakness matrix to analyze the Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threat of self and competitors, focus on the quality items that fall out of the 2 sigma and use the strength–weakness strategic chart to establish the improvement strategy. And at last, utilize the strength–weakness matrix chart as the control tool to verify and sustain the effectiveness of the improved performance. The complete and easy measurement improvement model provided in this article can be used by the enterprise to effectively and quickly evaluating and analyzing the service quality of self and competitors. And under the reasonable cost condition with considering the competing opportunity and threat of market to effectively improving the customer service quality and promoting the overall customer satisfaction and create powerful high value-added quality competition strength.     

Human capital determinants of the survival of entrepreneurial service firms in Spain

The claim of this paper is that an entrepreneur’s human capital constitutes a key determinant of the survival time of new service industry companies created in Spain. To confirm this claim, a series of survival models has been specified and estimated for a sample of 237 Spanish service industry companies founded by one or more entrepreneurs between the years 2000 and 2004. We found that (1) both general and specific human capital have a positive impact on the survival time of a new firm and (2) human capital is accumulative, in the sense that the larger the number of entrepreneurs founding the company, the longer its survival time. We find that the specific aspects of human capital that are determinants of a company’s survival time are gender, previous work experience in the same activity or as the owner of a firm, and the number of partners. However, educational and training characteristics do not play a relevant role as regards a firm’s survival time. These facts suggest the presence of a gap between the objectives and results of current entrepreneurial-oriented training in Spain.     

The establishment of a quality management system for the higher education industry

This study is based on the SERVQUAL model and the Plan-Do-Check-Action (P-D-C-A) cycle of TQM to establish a higher education quality management system. In this system, it includes ‘Plan’ and ‘Do’ dimensions to execute ten factors, each dimension complements with each other. The ‘Check’ dimension has four factors and the ‘Action’ dimension has three factors. Each execution factors of the quality management system could reduce the occurrence of five gaps in the SERVQUAL model and facilitate education providers to provide a better service quality. Education providers strengthen an education system by carefully planning and implementation of quality auditing and continuous improvement. The desired result of this study is to possess a more explicit framework for high education industry and provide a proper service for students.     

Portfolio Selection under Maximum Minimum Criterion

In this paper, we studied the problem of risky portfolio selection under uncertainty. Different from risk-return analytical methodology, we formulated a model under maximum minimal criterion of uncertain decision-making theory. If the investor had no any distribution information of the returns and (s)he knew the variation scopes of the returns by his/her knowledge of the market information or experts’ evaluations of the alternative risky assets, then we showed that the optimal portfolio strategy of the model under maximal minimal criterion could be obtained by solving linear programming. If the returns were known to be normal distributed, the investor’s optimal portfolio strategy could be obtained by solving a nonlinear programming. The paper also provided an algorithm to solve this programming. At last, the paper compared this model with Markowitz’s mean-varience (M-V) model and Young’s minmax model, and pointed out the distinctions and similarities between our model and the other two. Supported in part by Program for NCET, in part by the Key Project of Chinese Ministry of Education 104053.     

Using the fuzzy associative memory (FAM) computation to explore the R&;D project performance

This study found out there were nonlinear relationships between the R&D project performance and its determinants—R&D project manager’s skills, quality of project environment, and teamwork effectiveness—by using the Fuzzy Associative Memory (FAM) technique in the IC design industry of Taiwan. The results showed that R&D project manager’s skills and quality of project environment had significantly inverse U-shaped effects on the R&D project performance, while teamwork effectiveness had almost monotonic positive influence upon it. Therefore, there were optimal values for R&D project manager’s skills and quality of project environment for the R&D project performance in the Taiwanese IC design companies, although they can raise teamwork effectiveness as much as possible.     

All in the family: why non-democratic leaders have more children

Economists have come to learn that politics matters. But survival matters the most to those involved in politics. We provide a theory whereby non-benevolent, non-democratic leaders increase their expected family size to raise the likelihood that a child will be a match at continuing the regime’s survival. As a consequence, having a larger family size raises the non-democratic leader’s expected rents that they can exploit from the citizenry. In contrast, democratic leaders have a lower desire to appropriate rents from the citizenry, and therefore have a diminished desire to have additional children for these purposes. We construct a data set of the number of children of country leaders as of August 31, 2005. We find that in a sample of 221 country leaders, fully non-democratic leaders have approximately 1.5–2.5 more actual children as compared to if they are fully democratic. This empirical relationship is established controlling for a full array of country specific as well as individual specific variables. Our finding also continues to hold when using alternative measures of family size. This paper has been prepared for a conference honoring Herschel I. Grossman at Brown University in April of 2006. We thank our discussant, Murat Iyigun, an anonymous referee, Michelle Garfinkel and conference participants for excellent suggestions.     

Mapping the successful succession process in family firms: evidence from Greece

The succession process in family firms has by far been determined to be the most critical phase in the family business life-cycle (e.g. Morris et al. Journal of Business Venturing 18:513–531, 1997; Wang et al. 2000) and characterized as the period in which most family firm fatalities occur (Handler and Kram Family Business Review 1:361–381, 1988). This paper is an empirical study on Greek family firms and seeks to identify the critical success factors that have a major impact on the outcome of a generational transition in the leadership of the family firm. Based on an integrated conceptual framework proposed by Pyromalis et al. (2006), we test the impact of five factors, namely the incumbent’s propensity to step aside, the successor’s willingness to take over, the positive family relations and communication, succession planning, and the successor’s appropriateness and preparation on both the satisfaction of the stakeholders with the succession process and the effectiveness of the succession process per se. The results provide a useful insight and confirm the importance of the aforementioned factors in the succession process by mapping a safe passage through the family business succession process, and by contributing not only to the overall family business literature but also generating strong arguments in favor of the family firm as an integral entrepreneurial element for a region’s sustainable economic development.     

Tertiary student satisfaction with socialization: A statistical assessment

A careful evaluation of student satisfaction is central for tertiary education institutions because help them to pinpoint their strengths and identify areas for improvement. University student satisfaction is not directly measurable because it depends upon many different aspects. It may be studied through a composite indicator based on other variables (partial indicators) that are directly observed. In this paper we consider student socialization which is an important aspect of students’ educational experience even if it is not as widely considered as assessments of skills development and ratings of various aspects of courses and programs. More precisely we consider student relations with the other people that act within the university context: teachers, teacher assistants, non teaching staff, other students, citizens of the town that hosts the university. To grasp the complexity of university experience, it is not enough to know the degree to which students are satisfied, it is important to understand the factors that contribute to student satisfaction. To this end we propose a simple algorithm to find the most important partial aspects underlying the student satisfaction socialization issue. An application to students of the University of Padova is discussed. The method is compared to PCA, and it is shown that is much simpler to be used, requires milder assumptions and is always readily comprehended.     

Global human development: accounting for its regional disparities

This study’s multilevel statistical models quantify the effects of civilization zones and instrumental factors on the capacities for human agency that a country provides its citizens. These capacities are measured by the UN’s human development index, which synthesizes measures of literacy, longevity, and income. Indicators of political democracy, slavery, national debt, corruption, and internal conflict gauge the instrumental factors. Political freedom and emancipative employment coupled with civil order account for the regional differences in human development scores; civilization zones, heavily indebted poor countries, and corruption influence the variability among countries within the regions.     

Corruption, institutions and trade

The economics literature describes various factors that affect trade between countries, which, in addition to the standard economic and geographic factors, also include cultural, ethnic and historical factors. The present study is apparently one of only a few attempts in the literature to examine directly the effects of corruption on trade and the first attempt to examine trade over time in a specific country whose level of corruption changed significantly. Israel was chosen as the subject of the study mainly because of the fact that, according to international indexes, the country’s status as a civil society has declined significantly over the past decade. According to the corruption index of Transparency International, Israel was ranked 33rd in the world, at the end of the sample period in 2008, having fallen from 14th in 1995. The results of the research can serve as the basis for comparison to similar studies of other Western countries. The study’s conclusions support the hypothesis that the effect of corruption on trade of any given country is significant, stable and negative.