The perception of excellence within the luxury hotel industry

Abstract

How to deliver excellence service has always been one of the main goals to businesses. Hence, the main purpose of this degree thesis is to explore the different factors that affect customer perceptions of excellence within the luxury hotel industry. Therefore, each customer has different expectations about a visit that must be fulfilled by the hotel where they are being accommodated. Thus, this degree thesis is a continuity of the general literature review about customer perceptions and excellence within the luxury hotel industry. Furthermore, there are different definitions and theories throughout this research that have served as pillars to answer the research problem, such as the ones from academics like Parasuraman, Zeithaml, Karatepe or Fick. Then, there are previous studies about the topics analysed in this paper, but academics did not put them in common to understand them, as this degree thesis has successfully achieved. This research paper provides disparate factors that ultimately affect the way that customers perceive excellence, which should be used by companies from the luxury hotel industry, in order to create loyal customers. The factors analysed were demographic, behavioural, psychographic, and geographic or the cultural background of the client. Research about those factors was additionally done through online surveys, which were done to visitors to non-luxury and luxury hotels. Finally, findings have as a final managerial implication to draw general guidelines about how to deliver an excellence service in the hard and soft products of the visit, considering the characteristics analysed.