SERVICE QUALITY IMPROVEMENT IN 'I' HE THAI HOTEL INDUSTRY
by
Nida Thntirattanasoontorn
Faculty of International Business
University of South Australia
Abstract
At present, hotels in Thailand have been experiencing dramatic changes, leading hotel practitioners
to pay attention to service quality improvement. Empirical research, using in-depth face-to-face
interviews, has been conducted to examine service quality improvement in the Thai hotel industry.
Thirty hoteliers were recruitedfrom five-star hotels in Bangkok, Thailand, to find out their problems in
customer service, their critical success factors, barriers to success, what should be done to overcome
those problems, and what more could be done to continue to improve service quality. Though service
quality improvement initiatives in the Thai hotel industry are successful to some extent according to
respondents 'views, the findings, however, indicate hotels in Thailand might not exactly understand
their problems or have misallocated their resources to solve the problems. Therefore, hotels have to
increasingly solve customer service problems, improve quality initiatives, and create more necessary
quality programs based on present experiences and expertise.