GUESTS’ PERCEPTIONS ON FACTORS INFLUENCING CUSTOMER LOYALTY:

AN ANALYSIS FOR UK HOTELS

Prof. Ramakrishnan Ramanathan

Nottingham University Business School
Operations Management
Jubilee campus
Wollaton Road
Nottingham
Nottinghamshire
NG8 1BB
United Kingdom
ram.ramanathan@nottingham.ac.uk

Dr. Usha Ramanathan

Newcastle Business School
Logistics and Supply Chain Management
Northumbria University
City Campus (East)
Newcastle-upon-Tyne
NE1 8ST
United Kingdom
Submitted: 8 September 2009
1st Revision: 29 October 2009
2nd Revision: 2 February 2010
Accepted: 13 March 2010

Abstract

Purpose: In this paper, we explore how performances of UK hotels in terms of various service attributes
influence customers’ intention to stay again.
Design/methodology/approach: We use data from online customer ratings of 664 hotels in the UK for the
purpose. Our approach is based on an interesting use of statistical regression reported in the literature that
attempted to classify different cues in hotels as critical, satisfier, dissatisfier, etc. In this study, we consider
six prominent attributes namely customer service, cleanliness, room quality, value for money, quality of
food, and family friendliness, rated by guests based on their experiences of staying in hotels.
Findings: Our findings reveal that “Value for money” is a critical attribute while “Customer service”,
“Room quality” and “Quality of Food” are dissatisfiers. Business guests and guests of independent hotels
exhibit similar behaviour, but for leisure guests and guests of chain hotels, “Value for money” is a
dissatisfier.
Practical implications: “Value for money” is a critical attribute in that good performance in terms of this
attribute is critical for positively influencing guests’ intention to stay again; however failures in terms of
this attribute cannot be compensated by improving service in terms of other attributes. There are three
dissatisfier attributes (“Customer service”, “Room quality” and “Quality of Food”), implying that an
inadequate performance in terms of these attributes could significantly adversely impact guests’ intention to
stay again.
Originality/value: Our study seems to be the first one to use the extensive data available on the internet on
guest ratings of hotels.
Key Words: Hotel service attributes, classifications, online ratings, customer loyalty

1 INTRODUCTION
Ability of an organization to attract and retain customers is vital to its success. Customer loyalty
requires a strong desire by the customer for a product, and availability of several product vendors to choose
the product based on his/her preferences (Dick and Basu, 1994; Otim and Grover, 2006). These two factors
are very much applicable in the hotel industry as more and more people visit different places and need
places to stay (Nunes and Spelman, 2008), and huge number of hotels are available. Customer loyalty is
often shaped by positive experience by the customer during his/her stay in a hotel (Mason et al., 2006;
Nasution and Mavondo, 2008). A number of factors contribute to the experience – customer service,
cleanliness, facilities, price, food, location, etc. (Clow et al., 1994; McCleary et al., 1993; Yavas and
Babakus, 2005). The relationship between performance of hotels in terms of these factors and customer
loyalty has been a topic of several research studies (e.g, Boulding et al., 1993; Chao, 2008; de Ruyter et al.,
1998; Devaraj et al., 2001; Dube and Renaghan, 1999a,b). Most of these studies have attempted to use
statistical analysis to identify the relationships.
A related literature has attempted to identify the importance of performance levels of various
employee groups in influencing guest perceptions of hotel service quality (Cadotte and Turgeon, 1988; Chu
and Choi, 2000; Hartline et al. 2003; Silverman and Grover, 1995). Cadotte and Turgeon (1988) have
identified that some service categories in a hotel could earn compliments for good performance or receive
complaints for bad performance, and classified them into four categories: criticals, satisfiers, dissatisfiers
and neutrals. Silverman and Grover (1995) have categorized services offered by different employees in a
hotel as necessary, desirable and passive. Chu and Choi (2000) have categorized service attributes in terms
of their perceived importance and actual performance levels into four quadrants: good work (high
importance and high performance), overkill (low importance but high performance), low priority (low
importance and low performance), and concentrate (high importance but low performance). In this paper,
we adopt a similar approach to classify service quality attributes in a hotel using data from online ratings by
guests of UK hotels.
The paper is organized as follows. The next section provides a brief literature review of service
attributes of customer satisfaction in hotels. This section also includes some studies that attempted to
understand the behavior of different types of guests (leisure and business travelers), and different types of
hotel management (chain and independent hotels). Since this paper relies on data from guest ratings of
hotels available online, a brief review of empirical studies that used online ratings is also provided in the
section two. Our data and empirical analysis are explained in Section 3. Section 4 provides a further
discussion of our results giving some managerial implications. Finally, our results are summarized in
Section 5 along with some suggestions for future research.
2 LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Attributes of customer satisfaction in hotels
Customers use a variety of attributes to judge the quality of service that they receive during their stay
in a hotel (Wilkins et al., 2007). Both physical and service qualities of a hotel have positive impact on
customer satisfaction (Ekinci et al., 2008). Some of these criteria or factors are related to the intangible
service elements, some are related to the tangible physical elements, while some other factors such as
“value for money” are more complex to define (Mohsin and Lockyer, 2010). The intangible elements are
essentially service related – customer service, understanding and caring on the part of hotel management,
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assurance, and the relative convenience of dealing with transactions while staying in a hotel. This will also
include the service that the customer receives at the restaurant, if any, in the hotel. The tangible elements
are essentially related to the physical facilities – the availability and quality of various facilities in the room
(e.g., coffee facilities and bathrobe) and in the entire hotel (e.g., swimming pool and gym). The physical
appearance of hotel personnel, the cleanliness of the room as well as the entire hotel will also be included in
the physical elements. If the hotel has its own restaurant for use by the guests, the cleanliness of the
restaurant and quality of food are also some of the physical elements customers use to judge the quality of a
hotel (Han et al., 2009; Wu and Liang, 2009).
It has long been recognized that these factors in a hotel differ in terms of their ability to win
compliments or result in complaints from guests. An understanding of which attributes will enhance
compliments or will result in complaints is important for the management to improve overall customer
satisfaction and ensure customer loyalty. Several studies have been reported that attempt to provide
appropriate classifications of factors in a hotel using this premise (e.g., Claver et al., 2006; Holverson and
Revaz, 2006).
Using data from a restaurant and lodging survey, Cadotte and Turgeon (1988) have classified service
attributes into four categories: criticals, satisfiers, dissatisfiers and neutrals. Critical attributes usually have
high potential for compliments for good performance and high potential for complaints for poor
performance, and the authors found that the quietness of rooms in a hotel and the quality of food in
restaurants are usually classified in this category. Critical attributes represent both a threat and an
opportunity to management. Satisfiers are those attributes where unusually good performance elicits
compliments from guests while average or low performance will generally not elicit dissatisfaction from
guests. Examples include hotel lobbies or large portions of food in restaurants.
Using the theory of Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA), Silverman and Grover (1995) have
classified hotel service attributes as necessary, desirable, and passive to explain the ability of the attributes
in shaping the overall quality perceptions that leads to customers’ loyalty. Necessary attributes have to be
functioning properly in order that the overall quality of a hotel is judged as high quality. Desirable attributes
add to the baseline perceptions of quality if they are good; otherwise they may tend to reduce quality
perception but not to a point where overall quality is judged as poor. Passive attributes are generally not
solicited by guests. The same IPA framework has been employed by Chu and Choi (2000) to identify the
perceived importance levels of six hotel selection factors by business and leisure guests in Hong Kong.
Recently Mohsin and Lockyer (2010) have identified, using the IPA framework, that customers of luxury
hotels associate high importance to value for money, physical quality (room furnishings) and prompt
response on reservations.
Recently, Hartline et al. (2003) have combined the ideas of Cadotte and Turgeon (1988) and
Silverman and Grover (1995) to classify performance of different groups in hotels as necessary, desirable or
neutral. Based on a primary survey, they have found that the performance of front desk personnel is a
necessary cue in order to ensure good perceptions of quality. They have also found that the performance of
housekeeping and parking are desirable cues, while the performance of room service and bell staff were
neutral. In contrast to previous studies, the authors have adopted an interesting use of regression analysis to
base their classifications. Their approach involved running separate regressions for high performance
(above median) and low performance (below median) in terms of each of the service attributes. The
analysis in this paper is based on this approach and will be discussed in more detail in the section on
empirical analysis.
We have synthesized previous studies in the hotel literature and developed the classification scheme
shown in Table 1. The aim of the present study is to use the regression methodology adopted by Hartline et
al. (2003) to classify hotel service attributes as per the classification scheme shown in the table.
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Insert Table 1 about here
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2.1.1 Types of Hotel Management (Independent vs Chain)
In terms of the difference between the performance of independent hotels and hotels that belong to a
chain, Briggs et al. (2007) cite the works of Ingram (1996) and argue that hotels that are part of a chain are
expected provide a higher emphasis on service quality than hotels that are independently managed.
However, using data obtained from a questionnaire survey, they have found that customer service ratings in
terms of several operational factors (friendliness, standards, personal service, and tangibles) did not differ
significantly between chains of hotels and independent hotels.
2.1.2 Types of Guests (Leisure vs Business)
Hotels generally meet the needs of both business and leisure guests. Some studies in the literature
attempted to study the preferences of these two kinds of guests. Past studies indicate that cleanliness and
location were important attributes considered by business guests in making their hotel choice while leisure
guests considered security, personal interactions, and room rates as prime attributes in their hotel selection
(Clow et al., 1994; McCleary et al., 1993; Yavas and Babakus, 2005).
Yavas and Babakus (2005) have used a primary survey to investigate whether hotel choice attributes
are comparable across these two kinds. They found that both the categories seem to provide highest
importance to the availability of general amenities. But, the next ranked attributes varied across the two
categories. While business guests preferred convenience, core service, room amenities and ambiance in the
same order, the order of preference of leisure guests were core service, convenience, ambiance, and room
amenities. Using a structural equation modeling framework applied on primary data, Kashyap and Bojanic
(2000) found that perceived price and quality of public areas were significant in explaining ratings and
intention to revisit for both leisure and business guests. However, the impact of other factors different for
the two categories. Quality of room was significant in explaining ratings and intention to revisit for business
guests, but was not significant in explaining the behavior of leisure guests. Similarly, quality of staff
services was significant in explaining ratings and intention to revisit for leisure guests, it was not significant
in explaining the behavior of business guests. As mentioned earlier, Chu and Choi (2000) have used the
IPA framework in understanding the preferences of leisure and business travelers. They have found that
preferences of both business and leisure travelers did not differ much; both the categories stressed service
quality, value, room and front desk, and, security in making their hotel choices.
2.2 Empirical studies using online ratings
This paper attempts to use online guest ratings for analyzing the performance of hotels. Though
online ratings in hotel literature have yet to be widely researched, the last few years have seen many
research studies that attempted to empirically analyze online ratings in retail e-commerce. Heim and Sinha
(2001) examined the relationship between customer loyalty, and order procurement and fulfillment
processes in the case of electronic retailers. They used data from the online rating site, www.bizrate.com.
They identified three order procurement factors (website navigation, product information and price) and
three order fulfillment factors (product availability, timeliness of delivery and ease of return) as significant
in influencing customer loyalty. Thirumalai and Sinha (2005) have used online customer ratings from
www.bizrate.com to identify the significance of order fulfillment factors (on-time delivery, customer
support, order tracking and product met expectations) on customer satisfaction among various product
groups – convenience, shopping and specialty. Using factor analysis and ANOVA, they found evidence that
the importance of order fulfillment factors were different for specialty goods than for convenience goods or
shopping goods. Otim and Grover (2006) studied online customer ratings from bizrate using ordinary least
squares analysis to identify the effects of pre-purchase, transaction-related and post-purchase services on
customer loyalty. They found that post-purchase service factors (order-tracking support, on-time delivery
and customer support) influenced customer loyalty significantly. Similar conclusions were made by Jiang
and Rosenbloom (2005) using Bizrate data by employing structural equation modeling. Heim and Field
(2007) provided a more in-depth study to understand the process drivers of specific e-commerce assessment
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factors (payment process, on-time delivery, ease of returns and refunds, privacy experience and customer
support). Deviating from earlier studies, they chose to use data from another online rating site,
www.epubliceye.com.
We also use online guest ratings in this study to understand how customers emphasize different
service quality attributes in UK hotels. Our data source and empirical analysis are discussed in the next
section.
3 DATA AND EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS
3.1 Data Source – www.laterooms.com
Data used in our analysis has been obtained from guest ratings available in the website
http://www.laterooms.com/ during August-September 2008. LateRooms is a database offering hotel deals
across the UK and Worldwide. About 42 percent of the total number of accommodations available in
LateRooms is in the UK and Ireland. It was launched in 1999 in Manchester, UK. It has grown over the past
one decade and has offices in Milan and Barcelona as on 2008. It has also diversified its offerings by
including additional services such as theatre and restaurant bookings. It has strategically partnered with
travel agents (e.g., www.thetrainline.com) for wider appeal.
The LateRooms database comprises many options, properties from hotels to self-catering apartments,
from budget hotels to 5* hotels, and booking options from ordering online to telephone booking. A mobile
version of the main site is also available for wider appeal. The website provides extra information to
potential travelers by providing city guides. Hotel star classifications either based on self-classification by
the hotels themselves, or, assessed by the Automobile Association of the UK, VisitBritain, VisitWales or
VisitScotland. As per the press-pack (LateRooms, 2008), the website has over 650,000 registered users and
100,000 daily visitors. The company estimates that about 45 per cent of bookings are made within their
website for business travel whilst 55 per cent are made by leisure customers. About 75 per cent of bookings
are made for independent properties while the rest is booked for branded hotels. A majority of its customers
prefer 3* (44%) hotels, followed by 4* (27%) while about 2% of its customers book for 5* hotels.
One of the attractive features of LateRooms is the availability of user reviews. Users can read from
over 190,000 hotel reviews, written by guests who have booked through LateRooms and actually stayed at
the hotel. Guests utilizing the service of a hotel (booked through LateRooms) are subsequently asked by
LateRooms to rate the performance of the hotel. The rating is captured in terms of six different factors
namely Customer Service (denoted using the acronym CUSTSERV in this paper), Cleanliness of Hotel
(CLEAN), Quality of Room (RMQUAL), Value for Money (VALMON), Quality of Food (FOOD), and
Family Friendliness (FAMFR) of the hotel using a Likert type scale varying from Low (1) to High (6) with
additional options for non-availability (NA). In addition, the guest is asked whether he/she would stay in the
hotel again (Yes/ No) and whether he/she would recommend the hotel to a friend (Yes/No). The ratings
from all the reviewers of a hotel are then aggregated such that the hotel is rated using the 1-6 Likert scale
ratings for the six factors. The answers to the two Yes/No questions are summarized as percentages (per
cent of reviewers that said they would stay in the hotel again and per cent of the reviewers that said they
would recommend the hotel to a friend).
For the purpose of analysis in this paper, we have used these online ratings by hotel guests. It seems
it is the first time information from such hotel reviews are used to explore the relationships between
performance of hotels in terms of various factors and customer loyalty/satisfaction. However, the use of
online ratings for exploring such relationships is not new, with several studies existing in the context of e-
commerce websites (bizrate.com, epubliceye.com, etc.) as mentioned in Section 2.
3.2 Data
We collected ratings for hotels/guesthouses throughout the UK during August-September 2008.
Though our data considered not only hotels but also other properties such as guesthouses, we use the term

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hotels generically to denote all these properties in this paper. We selected only those hotels that received
ratings from at least 30 customers. Ratings for a total of 664 hotels were used in the study. About 44% of
these hotels are part of hotel chains while the remaining comprised independent hotels. The hotels received
ratings from a total of 24544 customers, of which 16739 are leisure customers and 7805 are business
customers.
Table 2 provides overall summary of the data. Ratings for customer service, cleanliness, quality of
room and value for money ranged from 2 to 6, while the ratings for the other two attributes ranged from 1 to
6. Mean ratings were all above 4 in terms of the service attributes. All the factors had significant
correlations with each other. This was also confirmed by an exploratory factor analysis, which yielded only
one factor with eigenvalue of 3.807 explaining 63.5% of the variance. The percentage of variance explained
is much more than the minimum of 50%, thus explaining convergent validity of the factor (Hair et al.,
2006). The reliability of the factor, measured by Cronbach’s alpha, is high at 0.88, which is higher than the
minimum stipulated value of 0.7 (Hair et al., 2006).
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Insert Table 2 about here
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3.3 Empirical analysis
We now describe our analysis to classify hotel service attributes in terms of satisfier and dissatisfier
in line with similar previous studies. In doing so, we have adopted the regression based classification
methodology of Hartline et al. (2003). Their approach involved first running a multiple linear regression
with all the variables with customer loyalty (stay again) as the dependent variable and hotel service
attributes as the independent variables, and then running separate regressions for high performance (above
median) and low performance (below median) in terms of each of the service attributes. The assessment of
whether a service attribute is critical or satisfier etc. is done based on the results. For all the regressions
discussed below, we first carried out the usual tests to check whether the assumptions of regression are
valid for the data. We have tested for normality assumption of the error terms and checked for multi-
collinearity and heteroskedasticity. We have verified and found that all assumptions for regression are
satisfied. In spite of significant correlations among performance criteria, there was no evidence of multi-
collinearity with all variable-inflation factors below the threshold of 10 (Hair et al., 2006).
For an attribute to be classified as critical, it has to be significant in explaining the willingness of
guests to stay again in the hotels when all the data is used in the regression analysis. We first present the
result of the multiple regressions for all the 664 hotels (for which all data were available) in Table 3. We
have used guest ratings on customer loyalty as the dependent variable and guest ratings in terms of other
service attributes as independent variables. The regression is significant as shown by the high value of F-
statistic (=171), which, as the single asterisk next to it shows, is highly significant at 1% level. The value of
R2 is also high (0.609) signifying that the independent variables are able to explain 60.9 percent of
variability in the dependent variable. Multi-collinearity is usually checked in a regression using Variable
Inflation Factor (VIF). If the VIF for a variable is more than 10, then there is evidence for multi-
collinearity. In the regression shown in Table 3, multi-collinearity is not a serious problem because all the
variables have registered VIF well below 10. The maximum Variable Inflation Factor (VIF) is 2.603 (for
the variable “Room Quality”), well below the recommended maximum value of 10.
Table 3 shows that the constant term of the regression (intercept) is significant with a value of
-5.428. The unstandardized coefficient for criterion “Customer service” has a value of 2.254 and this
criterion is significant at 1% level (shown by the single asterisk, which as the footnote to the table explains
is interpreted as p < 0.01). Other entries of this table can be interpreted in a similar way. It is evident from
the table that three criteria namely “Cleanliness”, “Room quality” and “Value for money” are highly
significant at 1% level in explaining guests intention to stay again in the hotel. “Quality of food” is
significant at 5% level while “Family friendliness” is not significant. Thus, “Family Friendliness” is
6
provisionally considered as desirable attribute while all others are provisionally considered critical
attributes.
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Insert Table 3 about here
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Results of regressions for low performance (below median) and high performance (equal to and
above median) of each of the hotel service attributes are shown in Tables 4 and 5 respectively. As in Table
3, we have used guest ratings on customer loyalty as the dependent variable and guest ratings in terms of
other hotel service attributes as independent variables in these regressions as well. All regressions shown in
Tables 4 and 5 are statistically significant as the F- statistic values are highly significant at 1% level.
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Insert Table 4 about here
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Before discussing results of Tables 4 and 5, we highlight the impact of the discrete 1-6 ratings on the
median split. Theoretically, a median score is chosen such that sample sizes above and below median are
equal. However, since the ratings are based on 1-6 scale, often the sample sizes above and below median
are not always equal. For example, consider the attribute “Customer Service.” When the entire data was
sorted in terms of this attribute, the median score was 5. Totally 400 hotels received a rating of 5 in terms of
this attribute. Thus the number of hotels that received a rating of less than 5 in terms of “Customer Service”
is much lower (shown by the sample size in the first row of Table 4, namely 201) than the number of hotels
that received a rating equal to and above this median score (shown by the sample size in the first row of
Table 5, namely 463).
We now turn our attention to interpreting the entries in the first row of Table 4. The first row
“Customer Service” indicates that this regression was run with the low performance (below median) in
terms of this attribute. The entire data was first sorted using ratings in terms of this attribute, and the median
score was calculated. Then all hotels that registered a rating less than this median score in terms of
“Customer service” were considered in the regression. As in Table 3, the numbers in the row indicate the
values of unstandardized regression coefficients. The level of significance is denoted by the asterisks near
the coefficient values. In the first row of Table 4, the constant term (intercept) was significant at 1% level,
“Customer service” was significant at 5% level, and, ”Cleanliness” was significant at 1% level.
Significance of other attributes can be interpreted in a similar way. The value of R2 is also high (0.773)
signifying that the independent variables are able to explain 77.3 percent of variability in the dependent
variable. Multi-collinearity is not a serious problem because the maximum Variable Inflation Factor (VIF)
is 2.205, well below the recommended maximum value of 10.
Second row of Table 4 show the results of regression when only those hotels that received below-
median ratings in terms of the attribute “Cleanliness” are considered. Other rows of Table 4 can be
interpreted similarly. Similarly, all the rows in Table 5 pertain to regressions on hotels that received equal-
to-and-above-median ratings in terms of attributes shown in different rows.
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Insert Table 5 about here
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For a critical attribute, it is important that the regression with low performance in terms of the
attribute will find none of the attributes to be significant, and/or it should always be significant in all
regressions (except for low performance in terms of this attribute). Table 4 shows that none of the
regressions have found all the attributes to be insignificant. But, we find that “Value for money” is

7
significant in all regressions in Tables 4 and 5. Hence we classify “Value for money” as a critical attribute
and provisionally classify all other attributes as desirable.
To be confirmed as a desirable criterion, the regressions with high as well as low performances in
terms of the attribute should show that attribute as significant. Thus a desirable attribute is interpreted as the
one where a low performance in terms of the criterion significantly reduces customer loyalty or a good
performance significantly improves customer loyalty. It may be noticed that “Value for money” is
significant in Table 4 corresponding to the row on the same attribute. This means that when all the hotels
that registered a below-median rating in terms of this attribute are considered in the regression, this attribute
was significant in explaining customer loyalty. Similarly, this criterion is significant in Table 5 also
corresponding to the row on the same attribute. Thus, “Value for money” can be classified as a desirable
criterion. However, this attribute has already been designated as a critical attribute. Thus a critical attribute
is also a desirable one but not vice versa. We find that none of the remaining attributes are desirable.
To be classified as a satisfier attribute, the regression with high performance in terms of the attribute
should show that attribute as significant but the regression with low performance should show the attribute
as insignificant. Thus a satisfier is interpreted as the criterion where a high performance in terms of the
attribute significantly improves customer loyalty but a low performance does not significantly reduce
customer loyalty. This interpretation is consistent with the definition of satisfier in Table 1. By looking at
Tables 4 and 5, we find that none of the remaining attributes are satisfier attributes.
As per Table 1, a dissatisfier is the attribute where unusually bad performance results in
dissatisfaction while average or low performance will generally not generate satisfaction from customers.
Thus a dissatisfier is interpreted as the criterion where a bad performance in terms of the attribute
significantly reduces customer loyalty but a good performance does not significantly improve customer
loyalty. In line with this interpretation, to be classified as a dissatisfier attribute, the regression with low
performance should show the attribute as significant but the regression with high performance in terms of
the attribute should show that attribute as insignificant. Looking at Tables 4 and 5, we find that three
attributes could be classified as dissatisfiers – “Customer service”, “Room quality” and “Food”.
The remaining two attributes namely “Cleanliness” and “Family friendliness”, are insignificant at the
regressions for low and high performances. Hence, they are grouped as neutral attributes. Our classification
of the attributes is shown in Table 6. Thus, there is one critical attribute (“Value for money”), there are no
desirable attributes, no satisfier attributes, but there are three dissatisfier attributes (“Customer service”,
“Room quality” and “Food”) and two neutral attributes (Cleanliness” and “Family friendliness”).
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Insert Table 6 about here
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3.3.1 Guidelines in making the classifications

On the basis of the analysis presented in this section, a set of logical rules can be developed to
classify attributes. These are given below. It is important that these should be used as guidelines in
classifying attributes.
1) A critical attribute should satisfy either or both of the following: (a) It should find no attribute to be
significant for the regression for low performance of this attribute, and/or (b) It should always be
significant in all regressions (except for low performance in terms of this attribute).
2) A desirable attribute should be significant both for high performance and low performance in terms of
the attribute. A critical attribute is also a desirable attribute but the reverse is not true.
3) A satisfier attribute should be significant for high performance but not significant for low performance
in terms of the attribute.
4) A dissatisfier attribute should be insignificant for high performance but significant for low performance
in terms of the attribute.

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 5) A neutral attribute will not be significant for the regressions for high and low performance in terms of
the attribute.
3.3.2 Classifications based on specific characteristics –guest types, and hotel management types
Given the differing interests of leisure and business travelers, we carried out further analysis focusing
exclusively on these two kinds of travelers. Similarly, given the literature (refer to section two) that
distinguishes the motivation to perform among the hotels that are part of a chain and hotels that are
independent, we carried out similar analysis classifying hotels in terms of chain or independent. Table 7
provides the results. It is interesting to see that no attribute is considered as critical by leisure travelers,
while“Value for money” is still a critical attribute for business travelers. Customers of hotels that are part of
a chain do not consider any attributes as critical while “Value for money” is the critical attribute for
customers of hotels that operate as an independent hotel. There are many neutral attributes.
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Insert Table 7 about here
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4 DISCUSSION
We believe that the results presented in the previous section can provide useful information for
managers of hotels. Table 7 shows that “Value for money” is classified as a critical attribute in most of the
cases. This is a complex attribute that calls for efficient operational practices that minimizes the cost of
operations, which will be ultimately passed on to guests who will perceive getting good service for the best
possible price. The importance of this attribute has been stressed in several studies on hotel performance
(Chen and Schwartz, 2008; Gallarza and Saura, 2006; Mattila and O'Neill, 2003; Oh, 1999). Al-Sabbahy et
al., (2004 ) have classified ‘value for money’ as an influencing factor of customer s’ future choice
behaviour. Chen and Schwartz (2008) stressed the importance of value when guests book a room on the
internet and showed that the patterns of changes in room rates observed by guests while searching for a deal
affects their propensity to book. Using a three year longitudinal study of a single hotel, Mattila and O'Neill
(2003) have found price as a significant predictor of overall guest satisfaction and three key guest-
satisfaction components: guest room cleanliness, maintenance, and attentiveness of staff. Using a structural
equation modeling study, Gallarza and Saura (2006), confirmed the existence of a quality–value–
satisfaction–loyalty chain in explaining the behaviour of tourist customers.
“Customer service” and “Family friendliness” are service oriented attributes. They are normally
classified as either neutral or dissatisfier in Table 7. Thus, in general, we can conclude that a high
performance in terms of these attributes may not add highly to customer intention to stay in the hotel again
but a poor performance is likely to be detrimental to guests’ intention to stay again. These attributes have
been generally considered as important in the literature (e.g., Brown and Maxwell, 2002; Piccoli et al.,
2001; Tsaur and Lin, 2004).
Room quality, cleanliness and food are components of product quality. Room quality is consistently
recognized as dissatisfier in Table 7. Thus, any perception of reduced room quality is likely to detrimental
to customers’ intention to stay again in the hotel. Cleanliness and food are generally neutral attributes.
Cleanliness is considered as satisfier for chain hotels. This could indicate that good cleanliness will add to
the perception of the entire group of hotels in the chain and help in facilitating the return of guests. In fact,
“Value for money” is not a critical attribute to hotels that are part of a chain but is a dissatisfier. Thus any
perception of low value for money is likely to dissuade guests from staying in the chain again. This finding
is consistent with previous observations by Briggs et al. (2007) that Chain hotels take a transformational
approach by providing a consistently efficient service.

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5 SUMMARY
We used the regression based approach of Hartline et al. (2003) to classify hotel service quality
attributes in terms of their significance towards guests’ intention to stay again. “Value for money” is
generally considered a critical attribute. A good perception in terms of this attribute is hence necessary to
help improve customer perception. “Customer service” and “Room quality” are considered as dissatisfiers,
indicating that any reduced performance in terms of this attribute could be detrimental to guests’
perceptions to stay again. “Cleanliness”, “Food quality” and “Family friendliness” are neutral attributes,
and they may not have much significance in shaping customers’ intention to stay again.
We believe our classification scheme has interesting information for the managers of hotels. Thus,
hotels should provide sufficient evidence to ensure that customers perceive good value of money in using
their services. Adequate delivery of customer service measures and good room quality should also be
ensured to improve customer satisfaction. Customers increasingly tend to purchase travel products (travel
tickets, hotel booking, etc.) online and online ratings are used by customers to select their vendors (Wen,
2009). Hence it is important for a hotel management to maintain a good online guests rating through
customer satisfaction.
While our study has provided important results, we wish to stress some of the limitations of our study
and scope for future research. The most important limitation of our study is the use of secondary data in our
analysis. Unlike a primary questionnaire survey, our data is not based responses of individual customers but
is based on the aggregated ratings provided by several customers (minimum 30) for a hotel. The
aggregation might have concealed some differences in individual responses. Because we have used
secondary data, the customer service attributes chosen in this study are limited by those collected online.
While all the six attributes considered in this study are important, some other potentially important
attributes (e.g., location, use of technology, etc.) could not be considered in the analysis. In addition,
demographic characteristics (e.g., age, gender, etc.) of respondents are not available in the secondary data
used in the study. If these details were available, sensitivity of our results on these demographic
characteristics could have been studied. Our analysis has been limited to UK hotels but more geographical
regions could be considered and related to the cultural perspectives of the region. Data can be collected and
analyzed over different time periods to understand the changing patterns of importance of hotel service
attributes. However, in spite of these limitations, we hope that the present study has provided an interesting
way of classifying customer service attributes in a hotel.

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Table 1: Proposed classification scheme for hotel service attributes
Classification Definition Examples
Critical Critical factors usually have high potential for • Performance of front desk personnel in a
compliments and high potential for hotel
complaints. • Quietness of rooms in a hotel
An unsatisfactory performance in critical • Quality of food in restaurants
factors cannot be compensated by better
performance in terms of other factors.
Desirable Desirable factors add to the baseline • Performance of housekeeping in a hotel
perceptions of quality if they are good; • Parking in a hotel
otherwise they may tend to reduce quality
perception but not to a point where
overall quality is judged as poor.
Satisfier Satisfiers are those factors where unusually • Hotel lobbies
good performance elicits compliments • Large portions of food in restaurants.
from guests while average or low
performance will generally not elicit
dissatisfaction from guests.
These provide an incentive to improve
performance as these performances will
be rewarded by customers.
Dissatisfier Dissatisfiers are those factors where • Parking in a restaurant
unusually bad performance results in • Variety of credit card options in a
dissatisfaction while average or low restaurant
performance will generally not generate
satisfaction from customers.
Minimum performance in terms of these
factors must be maintained, but these
factors do not warrant additional efforts
to achieve high performance as these
efforts may be better spent on satisfier or
critical factors that will be noticed by
customers.
Neutral Passive factors are generally not solicited by • Performance of room service in a hotel
guests. • Performance of bell staff in a hotel
Good performance in terms of these factors
may not be noticed by customers, and
bad performance may reduce perceptions
of service quality but not to a point where
overall quality is judged as poor.
Sources: Based on Cadotte and Turgeon (1988), Silverman and Grover (1995) and Hartline et al. (2003).

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Table 2: A descriptive summary of the data
Stay again Customer Service Cleanliness Quality of Room Value for Money Quality of food Family
(STAY) (CUSTSER) (CLEAN) (RMQUAL) (VALMON) (FOOD) friendliness
(FAMFR)
STAY 1
CUSTSER .618* 1
CLEAN .643* .642* 1
RMQUAL .689* .596* .710* 1
VALMON .679* .581* .582* .671* 1
FOOD .556* .662* .549* .538* .535* 1
FAMFR .461* .515* .433* .443* .468* .493* 1
Mean 83.181 4.779 5.013 4.662 4.561 4.437 4.187
Std. Dev. 14.500 0.680 0.657 0.766 0.674 0.866 0.838
Min. 14 2 2 2 2 1 1
Max. 100 6 6 6 6 6 6
* Correlation is significant at the p < 0.01 level (2-tailed)

Table 3: Result of overall regression for all the hotels (Dependent variable: STAY)
(Constant) CUSTSER CLEAN RMQUAL VALMON FOOD FAMFR
-5.428*** 2.254* 3.217* 5.005* 6.250* 1.436** 0.811
2 2
(R = 0.609, R adj. = 0.615, F = 171*, Sample size = 664 and maximum VIF = 2.603)

* p < 0.01, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.10.

Table 4: Results of regressions for low performance (below median) of each of the service attributes
Low Performance (Constant) CUSTSER CLEAN RMQUAL VALMON FOOD FAMFR R2 R2 F- Max.
adj. statistic VIF
CUSTSER (n = 201) -31.067* 5.309** 4.880* 5.590* 8.029* 1.021 0.164 0.773 0.597 48.112* 2.205
CLEAN (n = 114) -36.513* 1.781 3.850 6.213* 11.353* 2.770 0.828 0.634 0.614 31.190* 2.081
RMQUAL (n = 238) -35.696* 2.018 3.759* 7.629* 10.497* 1.547 1.193 0.605 0.594 59.132* 1.773
VALMON (n = 282) -37.826* 3.506* 3.694* 7.399* 10.423* 0.582 1.472*** 0.611 0.603 72.344* 2.031
FOOD (n = 71) -42.751* -0.635 4.283*** 6.409* 10.873* 6.608** 2.142 0.728 0.702 28.938* 2.654
FAMFR (n = 111) -26.278* 1.207 2.091 7.699* 8.230* 2.397 3.031 0.684 0.666 37.849* 2.580
* represents significance at p < 0.01, ** represents significance at p < 0.05, ***represents significance at p < 0.10

Table 5: Results of regressions for high performance (above median) of each of the service attributes
High Performance (Constant) CUSTSER CLEAN RMQUAL VALMON FOOD FAMFR R2 R2 adj. F- Max.
statistic VIF
CUSTSER ( n = 463) 22.723* -0.809 1.864** 4.469* 4.938* 2.118* 0.946 0.367 0.358 44.081* 1.811
CLEAN ( n = 550) 17.506* 2.479* 0.700 4.593* 4.802* 1.380** 0.483 0.380 0.373 55.616* 1.813
RMQUAL ( n = 426) 34.123* 3.634* 1.998** 1.176 2.442* 1.034 0.833 0.216 0.205 19.266* 1.771
VALMON ( n = 382) 32.665* 2.351** 1.641 1.268 3.969** 1.620** 0.580 0.181 0.168 13.868* 1.784
FOOD ( n = 593) 5.808 2.867* 2.656* 4.733* 5.175* 0.662 0.531 0.482 0.477 91.079* 2.182
FAMFR ( n = 553) 7.705*** 2.574* 3.079* 4.071* 5.817* 1.012 -0.358 0.479 0.473 83.823* 2.126
* represents significance at p < 0.01, ** represents significance at p < 0.05, ***represents significance at p < 0.10

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Table 6: Classification of attributes
Critical Desirable Satisfier Dissatisfier Neutral
Customer Service ×
Cleanliness ×
Room Quality ×
Value for money ×
Quality of food ×
Family friendliness ×

Table 7: Classification of attributes for leisure and business travellers, and for chain and independent hotels
CUSTSER CLEAN RMQUAL VALMON FOOD FAMFR
Overall Dissatisfier Neutral Dissatisfier Critical Dissatisfier Neutral
(based on Table 5)
Leisure travellers Neutral Neutral Dissatisfier Dissatisfier Neutral Neutral
Business travellers Neutral Neutral Dissatisfier Critical Neutral Neutral
Independent Hotels Dissatisfier Neutral Dissatisfier Critical Neutral Dissatisfier
Hotels that are part Neutral Satisfier Dissatisfier Dissatisfier Neutral Neutral
of a Chain

16