Linking Tourism Service Quality Measurement and Qualitative Marketing Research

Abstract

Generally, increasing service quality leads to more satisfied and loyal service customers. The instruments for measuring service quality are developed and implemented in many service industries, including tourism. However, using such instruments for assessing tourism service quality considers conducting quantitative marketing research which requires significant resources and cannot be performed constantly. On the other hand, the best way to capture all the aspects of tourism service quality is to use those instruments. The authors of this paper consider the possibility of using qualitative marketing research and available data about tourists’ reviews as a manner for monitoring tourism service quality constantly. They propose the approach in which tourists’ reviews are analysed within the qualitative marketing research framework by using quantitative tourism service quality instruments’ items and/or dimensions for coding. The demonstration of such an approach is presented followed by a managerial implications discussion.