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The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of including customers with special needs in the design of cultural and heritage services before the actual experience takes place.

Inclusive research through co-creation took place in the city of Barcelona, Spain, in 2017, comparing the effect of including (Route 2) or not including (Route 1) customers with visual and learning difficulties in the service design process of heritage walking routes.

The results show that the most important encounter in the heritage site context is communication, although the usage and service touchpoints were also significant. In addition, results showed that the ideal encounter or touchpoint should take place before the stay.

This paper contributes to learning about the designing of cultural and heritage experiences and including people with special needs in the service design process before the actual experience takes place.

The Government of Indonesia has started committing to promoting inclusive education since the release of the Minister of National Education of Indonesia's Regulation Number 70 of 2009, which focuses on discussing inclusive education. Indonesia has been facing some challenges with implementing inclusive education, including teachers' attitudes and skills, community acceptance, and support systems. However, considerable efforts have been made by related parties to implement this type of education. Besides issuing regulations, the government has produced and developed many programs regarding inclusive education. School members, professionals, and therapists work hand in hand to help special needs children in an inclusive school setting. Furthermore, the community has played its role as advisors, supporters, controllers, and mediators of the lives of children with special needs. At last, international organizations have been taking part in programs dedicated to inclusive education in Indonesia. It is hoped that all these collaborations will highly benefit the implementation of this education system.

The concept expressed by the phrase ‘accessible tourism’ reflects a case of which there is a lot of talk through the means of communication and through which it is possible to promote a theme that must be at the heart of individual subjects, or the accessibility to the use of public transport and mobility, catering and leisure, so it is a concept that aims to encourage a connection between the various services to make them truly usable for all those people who have diverse needs: children, the elderly, mothers with strollers, people with disabilities who move in a wheelchair or who have difficulty walking, people who have limitations in the upper and/or lower limbs, people who do not see and/or do not hear, who have allergies or intolerances to environments or food. Tourism is, therefore, inclusive. In any case, the word accessibility is configured as an ideal towards which, in order to achieve equality of rights and duties, an equality allows the individual to participate in social life as a whole. Therefore, we must not limit the aforementioned concept, only in relation to tourism, but we must consider it in a broader sense, for example, the World Health Organization (WHO) defines it as the ‘possibility of accessing the benefits that everyday life can offer, without encountering architectural barriers’.

The tourism sector, first of all, is that sector that has felt the need to pay attention to this issue. In particular, the tourism sector sees on the one hand the tourist offer that is proposed by the accommodation businesses, and on the other, the demand characterized by the need to satisfy ever more varied needs.

Accessibility, from this point of view, is configured as the most important feature that the tourist offer must have because it allows to bring the demand closer to the offer, managing to satisfy all the needs inherent in the characteristics of the various subjects. The characteristics that the tourism sector must possess in order to be able to speak of accessibility are as follows: firstly, this important word contains many meanings. It is customary to consider the following aspects in order to take into consideration the concept of accessibility: architectural barriers, sources of danger and sources of fatigue. The presence of these elements makes accessible tourism incomplete because it cannot satisfy the users of these services.

Very often, in fact, institutions and ministries have framed within the concept of accessibility all those people in wheelchairs or those paraplegic subjects, as well as all those people with reduced motor skills.

It is therefore necessary to be able to frame the users of accessible tourism and in this wake to propose accessible transport, viable accommodation facilities, but also proposals and programs with itineraries that are once again accessible. In any case, the audience of recipients of accessible tourism cannot be framed in a certain and definitive way, since people with reduced mobility or to whom the offer of accessible structures and services is extended may concern not only subjects with different types of disabilities such as problems of motor, sensory, cognitive or health type but also people who have food-type difficulties such as, for example, people with food allergies or intolerances.

Tourist accessibility is, however, a problem that occurs in every situation of everyday life. The solution to solve the problem of accessibility must be implemented consistently and gradually: a shared awareness of the creation of a built, urban and building space is needed, as well as consultation at all legislative levels in order to reach a clear and efficient legislation.

Making every guest feel like an active protagonist of their tourist experience must be the goal for all those who care about the well-being and satisfaction of all their guests.

BeingBeing able to offer accessible hospitality is an indicator of not only efficiency and professionalism but also great attention to the quality of the service, also in the face of specific requests from guests with disabilities. It means being able to be highly competitive and enjoy an advantage that allows you to stand out.

Tourism companies can insert important ethical values within their strategic business vision by investing in a social business.

What are the advantages that accessible hospitality can offer to a hotel? The expansion of the market through: 1) the increase in seasonality; 2) the increase in turnover; and 3) customer loyalty.

To achieve these advantages, however, it is necessary to adopt strategies.

Training is the most powerful tool through which those who govern the company can transfer the philosophy and know-how of industry experts on accessible hospitality directly to their collaborators, both in positions of responsibility and coordination and merely executive personnel – skills necessary to set up an organized structure that aims at the best quality of its services and therefore at the satisfaction of its guests.

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a suitable tool for understanding the expectations of hotel guests from services provided to them and designing the new one. It is also a well-known technique for improving service and product quality in general. First applied by Yoji Akao in 1960, the idea behind QFD is to understand the customer needs and determine the problem which might be associated with product or service provided by an enterprise. The purpose of this paper is to present how check-in operations in hospitality business can be improved with the help of QFD.

In this study, deep interview was employed as main data gathering instrument. Once customer expectations were assessed, a House of Quality scheme was established. Consequently, the QFD matrix was being analyzed as a whole.

The results of the study demonstrate that customers do not want to wait in queue or for any process on the front desk.

The research contributes to the literature a new technical term on hospitality industry, “Voice of Hotel.”

Service and product support are increasingly critical elements in the achievement of customer satisfaction and winning new markets. The success of a product support strategy depends on how effectively these services are delivered. The focus of this paper is on performance enhancement through the use of service delivery strategies; critical factors in the marketing of product support and service‐related contracts that, in turn, foster customer satisfaction, based on industrial systems in a multinational environment. Considered in the framework are product design characteristics such as reliability, maintainability, customer's organizational culture and geographical location, for functional as well as conventional products. The paper advocates an increased focus on support to customers within the framework, introduces a modified service gap model and suggests an approach that reduces any gap between expected and required services. An evaluation of service delivery performance is emphasized.

The experience of safety as perceived by customers is a central issue in retailing, and its importance has increased because of the pandemic. Substantial literature exists addressing different factors related to safety/security experience in different types of retail channels. However, what is missing is a unified framework to guide safe customer experience initiatives across all channels. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the safety elements in omnichannel retailing as perceived by customers and how these safety elements affect customer experience (CX) judgments and consumer behavior in a post-pandemic context.

A systematic literature review on safety/security studies in a retail context is conducted, followed by a qualitative study driven by a means-end-chain laddering technique collecting data from 62 retail customers in Australia, the USA and UK.

Fourteen distinct safety elements in omnichannel retailing are identified. Four elements are relevant to the CX at the pre-purchase stage of the customer journey: social inclusiveness, role readiness, employment policy and safety policy enforcement. Six elements are relevant to the during-purchase stage: physical safety, personal hygiene, spatial distancing, fraud prevention, security surveillance and safety signal. The remaining four elements are relevant to the post-purchase stage: delivery safety, safety recall, mental health and data usage.

This study presents a new unified framework addressing safety and security in post-pandemic retail service settings. The SafeCX framework offers researchers and managers a holistic understanding of the distinct safety elements that shape customers’ perceptions across each customer journey stage of the retail CX.

One‐to‐one marketing has received increased attention by academics and practitioners. In essence, one‐to‐one marketing reconfigures the familiar four Ps into one element: the relationship. It represents the ultimate expression of target marketing ‐ a market of one ‐ or at least one at a time. It is safe to say that the concept has been refined and its potential has been highlighted. Still unresolved is the means by which organizations can implement one‐to‐one marketing. A promising solution is the application of the information technology data mining technique. Data mining allows organizations to find patterns within their internal customer data. As a result, data mining is often called Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD). Whatever patterns are uncovered can lead to identification of likely target segments. Armed with such information, organizations can refine their targets and develop their technology to achieve true one‐to‐one marketing. While a promising technique, data mining must be developed and applied intelligently by managers. In addition, managers must realize that marketing 1:1 requires the combined skills of a multi‐disciplinary team.

Marketing; customer segmentation; operations and logistics.

Undergraduate business and management students, MBA/MA level application for international marketing modules incorporating customer segmentation and customer asset management.

DHL, the international air express and logistics company, serves a wide range of customers, from global enterprises with sophisticated and high volume supply-chain solutions shipping anything from spare parts to documents, to the occasional customer who ships the odd one or two documents a year. To be able to effectively manage such a diverse customer base, DHL implemented a sophisticated customer segmentation cum loyalty management system. The focus of this system is to assess the profitability from its customers, reduce customer churn, and increase DHL's share of shipments.

Case teaching objectives: to demonstrate the concept of customer segmentation with loyalty management as a total system in a logistics company setting, and to evaluate appropriateness of the classification; to utilize the concept of service tier model within the company's current operations, and to evaluate the effectiveness of the model; to analyze the implementation of the customer segmentation cum loyalty management system and development of the necessary rules required to classify the various accounts into categories; to highlight the possible challenges arising from the implementation of customer segmentation cum loyalty management system, and to discuss possible methods of resolution.

Teaching note.