In today's volatile business environment, hotels are competing for a larger share in the market and customer-driven quality management is becoming the preferred method for improving their performance. To ensure success, a hotel needs to measure the quality of service it renders to its guests in order to identify areas that may require improvement. This fact prompted the researcher to apply the Servqual model to assess the customers' perceptions and their expectations of service quality provided by hotels. The study was quantitative in nature and conducted in the form of a self-administered survey. The findings revealed that the average ratings for expectations were higher than the average perception ratings in all five dimensions of service quality (reliability, empathy, assurance, responsiveness and tangibles). This resulted in a negative total Servqual gap. Tangibles had the largest gap score (-0.59333) when compared with the other gap scores. This implied that guests attached high expectations to the tangible elements of the hotel. In contrast, reliability had the lowest gap score (-0.166) when compared with the other gap scores.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.