Quality definitions and implication
Quality in service industries has both static and dynamic dimensions (Day and Peters,
1994). The static dimension represents the expectation of the customers, that always
changes over time as extra facilities such as in-flight meals become the rule rather than
the exception. Dynamic dimension of quality occurs during service delivery and offers
opportunities for the customer to be delighted by the extra efforts of staff to, for
example, address the customer tangible product which is a primary cause of customer
dissatisfaction, but dynamic quality is not achieved easily. By definition, spontaneous
acts of dynamic quality, cannot be pre-arranged or scripted, but are nevertheless an
important means of customer satisfaction (Ingram et al., 1997).
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There are many definitions and implications for the quality as a concept. The main
definitions and implications are summarised in Table I.
Whatever the definition of quality is, for success in a highly competitive tourism
market, a tourism enterprise/destination has to make sure it is providing the goods or
services that the customer wants; it gets its quality right; and that it delivers on time. This
leads to customer satisfaction and achieving a suitable level of profits. Quality in service
delivery leads tomore repeated visits and greater sales revenue. This enables serving staff
on performance-related pay to earn more and enhance the quality of their service to the
customer. In addition, the extra profit generated enables tourism enterprise/destination
management to invest in upgrading facilities to the customer and in training schemes
beside creating innovative business environment for tourism services improvement.
The philosophy of quality
Deregulation and globalization have increased competitive pressures, helping to bring
down prices and to improve the quality of services provided by professional tourism
enterprises/destinations. From this standpoint, what it is needed is to enforce compliance
with safety and environmental regulations and new working conditions. The 1980s
witnessed many service industries placing increased emphasis on managing quality.
Traditional ideas of quality, which had evolved from manufacturing industries and had
been based on the conformance to the standards defined by operation management, began
to be replaced by customer-focused notions. This required close consideration ofwhat the
customer wanted and how their needs could be met. Different dimensions of service were
defined and customer satisfaction, considered to be the gab between perceived and
expected service, was assessed. Quality management began to be viewed as an overall
processwhich involved everybody fromtop management down to junior staff rather than
just to dowith concentrating on the employee-customer interaction.Newapproaches such
as TQM and the continuous improvement programmes began to be applied by an
increasing number of service industries (Souty, 2003; Lockwood and Guerrier, 1989).
However, the source of competitive advantage is found firstly in the ability of the
organization to differentiate itself, in the eyes of the consumer, from its competitors and
secondly by operating at a lower cost and hence at greater profit. This requires
examining consumer service under three conditions (Lalonde and Zinszer, 1976):
(1) pre-transaction elements;
(2) transaction elements; and
(3) post-transaction elements.