Stakeholders’ perceptions of service quality in hotels

Abstract

Ghana is said to have the distinctive peculiarity of delivering poor service and anecdotal evidence suggests that hotel customers, both domestic and international guests have in one way or the other experienced shortfalls in the quality of services offered. Guests have expressed varied needs and expectations during their stay but hotels have not responded adequately. This study explored the perceptual interface between guests and service providers. The study gathered cross-sectional data using questionnaires from 172 hotel guests, 197 frontline employees and 125 management staff. The findings of the study reveal that there were significant differences between guests and service providers’ perceptions of service quality. It is therefore recommended that managers of hotels put in extra effort to minimize the gaps between guests and frontline staff’s perceptions by training employees and treating them as internal clients so that they understand and appreciate how the hotel works in order to satisfy and motivate employees to satisfy customers.