THE "SERVQUAL" THEORY AND IMPROVEMENT PROCESS TO IMPROVE SERVICE QUALITY AND GUEST'S SATISFACTION: A CASE STUDY OF FRONT OFFICE DEPARTMENT AT CENTARA WATERGATE PAVILLION HOTEL BANGKOK.

Abstract

At present, hotel industry has been experiencing dramatic changes, leading hotel practitioners to pay attention between service quality and guest’s satisfaction. Service quality and guest’s satisfaction maintenance are the biggest contemporary challenges of every department in the hotel, especially front office department which is the center of guest service The purpose of this research is to examine the linkage between front office operations following the standard operation procedures, and improvement process to improve service quality and guest’s satisfaction. This study adopts the applied the SERVQUAL theory, which Parasuraman and colleagues used in their study, to analyze the dimension of service. The researcher uses it together with empirical studies to analyze service quality in front office department, and improve it to positive way. The researcher finds mains problems as following: front staffs lack of awareness, and do not process service operations following standard operation procedure, some service dimensions from the “SERVQUAL” theory are note met guest’s expectation, and uneffective improvement process to improve staff’s performance. The study utilizes a review of the literature to propose a conceptual model of service quality, front office operations, guest’s expectation and satisfaction, and improvement process. This research is based on qualitative methods: observation (participate), research action, and in-depth interview to analyze the result. The results of this study provide hotel professionals with an assessment of service quality and improvement process to hotel management, head of department, and researchers, who are interested in this topic. They can use this research together with hotel strategy to maximize the benefits of the organization, such as positive hotel review, hotel market and revenue, and stable of the organization.