Natasha Miteva

An analysis of 168 critical incidents of service success or failure for seventeen hotels in Hong Kong found that the most common critical incident involved a hotel employee responding to a guest request. That stands in contrast to an earlier study conducted in Western hotels that identified service recovery as the most common critical incident. The analysis is based on interviews with fifty-six front-desk employees in a diverse group of Hong Kong hotels. When it came to service recovery, hotels in Hong Kong were inclined to apply compensatory responses, while earlier studies found that Western hotels favored corrective responses, even when customers preferred compensation. The comparison of Western studies with those of Hong Kong highlight cultural differences with regard to service. One particular difference was employees’ assessment of the source of customer dissatisfaction. Whereas respondents in Western studies seemed to cite external causes, the delivery system, or the customer...

Starting from around year 1800 with the use of the term “tavern keeping”, tourism and hospitality today stand for the fastest growing industry and an important supporting factor of the economy as a whole. This growing trend led to the formation of hotel chains, the evolution of brand management and numerous successful strategies. For, being present on the global market and gaining customer loyalty is today’s must for the hotel chains. This paper focuses on the impact of hotel chains on customer satisfaction and loyalty. Research shows that there is a strong connection between brand positioning on the market and the customer perspective, which furthermore leads to an opportunity of gaining customer satisfaction and loyalty, as a prove for positively correlated relationship