Hotels in the United States not only provide their services to guests domestically,
but also to those who come from abroad. With this diversity in customers comes many
different perceptions and expectations of what constitutes good service. For this reason,
it is essential for hotel businesses to understand the underlying differences among
cultures. Better understanding of differences can help hotels integrate the different needs
more effectively in their products and service offerings. As a result, it is possible to grant
more globalized, custom services that would cater to their unique customers.
Hotels’ practices often dismiss the importance of cultural background in their
continual attempts to provide the best quality service based on their own understanding of
service quality. Moreover, understanding a culture may seem irrelevant as the
complexity of culture add to the difficulty of measuring the critical elements within
providing quality service. These critical elements, identified through research done in the
past, are already difficult to utilize effectively to accommodate guests from abroad.