The Measurement of Service Quality in the Tour Operating Sector: A Methodological Comparison

Abstract

Service quality in the tourism industry receives increasing attention in the literature and yet confusion still exists as to which measure offers the greatest validity. The two main research instruments are Importance Performance Analysis (IPA) and SERVQUAL.However, both measures have been questioned and research has introduced measures that multiply SERVQUAL by Importance, as well a measure of just performance (SERVPERF). This paper assesses these four main methods of measuring customer service quality. The data were obtained in co-operation with a major UK tour operator. 220 respondents completed a questionnaire before departure on what elements were important to them and what their expectations were for these elements. Then towards the end of their holiday respondents were issued with a second questionnaire measuring performance on the same elements. The research found that although there was variety in the rankings of the 13 different elements, there was no statistical difference between the four methodologies. The final section of the paper considers the implications of this finding for tourism managers and future research in the area of service quality.

Standard Resort Hospitality Elements: A Performance and Impact Analysis

“…If literature suggestions are followed, where one factor should be forced into each quadrant, only family-driven services would be changed to overkill where the resort is over-exceeding customer expectations. Regardless of this forced categorization, which is typically not followed in hospitality and tourism (Hudson, Hudson, & Miller, 2004), and when these results are compared to the modified IPA methodology, differences exist between the recommendations provided to management based upon methodology.…”

Analysing trust as a means of improving the effectiveness of the virtual supply chain

“…IPA was introduced almost 30 years ago (Martilla and James, 1977) and originally involved a procedure to show "the relative importance of various attributes and the performance of the firm, product, or destination under study in providing these attributes" (Hudson et al, 2004). The IPA technique has been modified and developed over time and the modification of IPA used here employing importance and gap is similar to that used by Easingwood and Arnott (1991) who employed two dimensions, i.e., current effect on performance (similar to importance) and scope for improvement (similar to gap within the current study).…”

“…The four improvement quadrants were labelled in order of priority, i.e., 'Critical', 'Significant', 'Important', and 'Necessary'. The quadrant cross hairs (Hudson et al, 2004) on the graph have been determined by using the mean overall gap and overall mean importance of the 12 trust factors investigated within the context of the meat and horticulture industry. Figure 1 indicates that the 12 factors of trust in the meat industry all have gaps that require improvement and have been plotted on the matrix according to their mean unweighted gap and importance.…”

Measuring Service Quality of Rural Accommodations

“…Importance-Performance analysis (IPA) has been applied to different areas in the services industries [16][17][18][19][20][21]. IPA is a simple but effective tool because it can analyses service quality attributes on two dimensions: performance and importance [22].…”

“…It has been applied to the hotel industry [23,24], tourism policy [25], and tourist destinations [18,21]. And the combination of IPA and gap analysis helps maximize the validity of application [17,[26][27][28]. Therefore, this research has utilized IPA and gap analysis simultaneously in order to improve and maximize the precision and validity of the application.…”