Customer satisfaction in hotels in Cape Town

Abstract

Customer satisfaction is one of the most important strategic mechanisms of best practice hotel organisations. Daily, managers and employees are continuously faced with the challenges of establishing and maintaining customer satisfaction. The purpose of this study is to seek and identify measures that can be used in the hospitality industry for purposes of assessing and evaluating customer satisfaction and customer service effectiveness. The results from the research will enable hotel owners, managers and decision makers to identify the best practices in customer service design, culminating in customer value. The primary objective of this study is to assess customer expectations and perceptions of service quality in Cape Town based hotels, and to identify the gaps between client expectations and perceptions. This will be used as a basis to investigate the challenges that Cape Town hotels experience pertaining to internal and external customer strategy development and satisfaction. These identified challenges will be used as learning opportunities for improvement in aspects of quality and to establish a usable model for the organisation (hotels) from which strategies can be developed for the effective management of customer relations, and to ensure that customer expectations of service quality are met. The researcher will use SERVQUAL and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) scoring method to rate the customer’s level of satisfaction with each service attribute into an overall service performance of each hotel. The researcher will recommend an appropriate quality improvement mechanism to measure, analyse and improve processes in the hospitality industry.