Customer Participation on Service Quality.

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION MEASUREMENT IN HOTEL INDUSTRY: CONTENT ANALYSIS STUDY Ivanka Avelini Holjevac University of Rijeka Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management Opatija Opatija, Croatia e-mail: [e-mail] Suzana Marković University of Rijeka Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management Opatija Opatija, Croatia e-mail: [e-mail] and Sanja Raspor University of Rijeka Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management Opatija Opatija, Croatia e-mail: [e-mail] ABSTRACT One of the biggest contemporary challenges of management in service industries is providing and maintaining customer satisfaction. Service quality and customer satisfaction have increasingly been identified as key factors in the battle for competitive differentiation and customer retention. Lam and Zhang (1999) claim that overwhelming customer demand for quality products and service has in recent years become increasingly evident to professionals in the tourism and hotel industry. Among all customer demands, service quality has been increasingly recognized as a critical factor in the success of any business (Grönroos, 1990; Parasuraman et al., 1988). The purpose of this study is to examine hotel guest comment cards (GCCs) and customer satisfaction management schemes in Opatija’s hotels. This study adopts the applied content analysis approach which Gilbert and Horsnell (1998) used in their study, utilizing comparison and recording of findings based on a set of best practice criteria. The results of this study provide hotel professionals with an assessment of current methods of measuring and managing customer satisfaction in Opatija’s hotels. Key words: customer satisfaction, service quality, measurement techniques, content analysis, hotel industry INTRODUCTION During the past few decades, customer satisfaction and service quality have become a major area of attention to practitioners and academic researchers. Both concepts have strong impact on business

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