Md Sayeed

Service Quality
- Expectations, perceptions and satisfaction about Service
Quality at Destination Gotland - A case study

Authors: Md.Hussain Kabir and Therese Carlsson
Subject: Master thesis in Business Administration
Program: Masters Program in International Management 15 ECTS
Gotland University
Spring semester 2010
Supervisor: Bo Lennstrand

Abstract
This thesis is discussing and analysing expectations and perceptions about service quality in
Destination Gotland. The aim is to analyze and research about the role of service quality for creating customer satisfaction and we want to find out the gap between expectations and perceptions through the customers point of view. The difference between expectations and perceptions can be described as satisfaction or lack of satisfaction. The specific questions that are researched in this thesis are:
1. What expectations does customer have on Destination Gotland‟s service quality to become satisfied?
2. What perceptions does customer have about the service quality at Destination
Gotland?
3. What are the differences between expectations and perceptions (gap 5 in the
SERVQUAL-model)?
The survey is constructed as a case-study and is based on the quantitative method. The results from the different dimensions show that there is a gap between expectations and perceptions which means that the customers are not fully satisfied about the service quality at Destination
Gotland. On the other hand, the main respondents said yes on the question if they think the service meet their expectations. From the overall result in the statements we can see that there are several gaps between expectations and perceptions which means that the service quality do not fully meet the expectations. The result shows a total gap at -0,39.

Keywords: Service quality, customer satisfaction, expectations, perceptions, case-study,
SERVQUAL, Destination Gotland.

1

Acknowledgements
First of all we would like to say

References: customer perceptions and customer expectations. Oliver (1997) argues that service quality can be described as the result from customer comparisons between their expectations about the Oliver (1997) argues that customer satisfaction can be described as a judgement that a product or service feature, or the product or service it self, provides pleasurable consumption. 1.1 Background Oliver (1993) stated that during the past decades, in the marketing literature and marketing Schneider and Bowen (1985) and Tornow and Wiley (1991) found a positive correlation between the attitude of employees, the attitude of customers and employee and customer According to Eskildsson (1994) over the past decades, many attempts have been made in both private and public sectors in the hope of making improvements in processes and services from interrelationships with both managers and customers (Tornow and Wiley, 1991). According to Oliver (1980) the customer satisfaction research literature concerns how well the service delivery occurs in comparison with expectations Andreassen T W (2001) mentions that customer satisfaction can be viewed as an evaluation where expectations and actual experience is compared