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This paper seeks to illuminate how the emphasis on quality dimensions differs in service firms dependent on the size of their back‐room activity. It examines how that emphasis differs with Quality Certification (QCert). The research examines the relative importance attached by the chief executives of 93 large service organisations to both internal and external dimensions of quality. It analyses the relationship of these quality dimensions to the importance placed on the possession of QCert. The effect of process structure is explored by categorising service firms as being in front‐room versus back‐room dominant industrial sectors. The research findings provide empirical evidence that service firms who rate the possession of QCert as important, place much more emphasis on quality, and have a balanced perspective where internal and external quality are both emphasised. In contrast, service firms that do not promote QCert, emphasise quality less. In the absence of QCert, we find clear differentiation in how quality is conceptualised in front‐room versus back‐room dominant industrial sectors.

The article examines the usage and relative importance of quality measurements in the UK’s largest service companies. The authors analyse the relationship of both internal and customer‐based quality measurements to the importance placed on accreditation to an ISO 9000 standard. The effect of process structure is explored by categorising the service firms as being in front‐room or back‐room dominant service sectors. The authors find that the service firms, which consider accreditation to be important, have a different emphasis on quality than other service firms do. Significantly, their emphasis shifts from one that is in line with their process structure to a more balanced one, where both internal and customer‐based quality measurements receive similar attention. This leads them to conclude that accreditation to an ISO 9000 standard can make a profound difference to the way quality is perceived and measured in large service firms.

In Australia, male sports attendees outnumber female sports attendees by 25%, yet little research has been conducted into the attendance motives of women. This study undertakes an analysis of 460 respondents using descriptive and multivariate statistics to distinguish the attendance motivations of women and compare them directly to those of male attendees. The findings suggest that female attendance can be influenced through management and promotional strategies.

The aim of the study is to assess customer perceptions of service quality delivered by front office, room service and an in house restaurant/café in the lodgings of Hamilton, New Zealand.

The study uses a survey and interview technique. A survey questionnaire with the help of local managers in the lodging industry was structured for this study. The study was undertaken at different lodgings in Hamilton involving face‐to‐face administration of the survey instrument. A useable sample of 645 participants resulted.

The importance–performance analysis showed that responses related to front office, room service and in‐house café/restaurant, the importance is statistically significant, higher than the performance. Gender also reflected statistical significance. Overall, the results indicate that most responses show gaps in importance and evaluations and this suggests managerial implications.

From a practitioners perspective the study provides an opportunity to recognize in ranking order general features that are considered important by the guest staying in lodgings in Hamilton in New Zealand. Additionally, the study also points out the evaluation of those guests, thereby identifying the areas of gaps in service and product quality.

The study has been the first attempt to gauge the importance and experience from the stay of lodging guests in Hamilton, New Zealand. The research also provides an opportunity for a comparative study of service quality offered by lodgings in New Zealand with other parts of the world.

This paper aims to define an adapted contemporary design language for housing built next to vernacular residential buildings of Anatolian villages. The case has been selected from Balıkesir province in the North-western part of Anatolia within a corpus of 104 houses from selected 81 villages of the region. Originally, vernacular house plans consist of allocation of rooms around a hall: sofa. Each room is a core living space with everyday living needs for a family. House is formed with various spatial relations between sofa and rooms around it. This relation is the determinative feature in formation of vernacular language for each Anatolian house. The study has three phases: analysis, adaptation and generation. The first phase analyzes the elements of vernacular by decomposing its language into sub-parts. In the second phase, the inadequacies of existing vernacular structures were exposed with methods of observation and questionnaires applied on users and new demands for living have been adapted with vernacular existing language grammar rules. In the last phase within the framework of adapted language rules for Balıkesir vernacular, numerous novel design alternatives were generated. This study claims to sustain the existing socio-cultural spatial configuration by adapting newly built contemporary houses to actual vernacular architecture in the planning context.

The aim of the study is to assess the service quality perception of customers of luxury hotels, New Delhi in India and to help the hotel management identify areas that need attention to meet and exceed customer expectations.

The study uses a survey and interview technique to accumulate information for analysis using SPSS version 12 and was conducted at different four‐ and five‐star hotels in New Delhi involving hotel guests agreeing to participate. A usable sample of 271 participants resulted with a large majority being male.

The importance‐performance analysis shows that, for responses relating to front office, room service and in‐house café/restaurant, the importance score is statistically significant to and higher than the performance rating. Overall, the results indicate significant difference between expectations of the guests and actual experiences, thus highlighting managerial implications.

The current study cannot claim to be wholly conclusive as it is limited to a small sample size from only one metropolitan city of India and there could be subjectivity in responses. From a practitioner's perspective the study provides an opportunity to recognise, in ranking order, features that are considered important by the guests staying in luxury hotels of New Delhi in India and to identify the areas of disparity in service and product quality.

It is observed that this is a significant study of service quality in luxury hotels in India; in that sense the study contributes to the literature and provides an opportunity for a comparative study of service quality with other such studies undertaken in different parts of the globe.

The ongoing challenge for hospitality firms is not to avoid service failures completely but rather to find effective ways of recovering from them. The purpose of this paper is to adopt conjoint analysis to examine guest preferences for service recovery actions that are taken simultaneously and the effect of such actions in the context of hotels in order to seek answers to the following research questions: what type of compensation bundle is most preferred by guests? and How effective are compensations in terms of recovery satisfaction, especially with regard to subsequent behavioral intentions?

In order to study guest preferences for compensation, choice-based conjoint (CBC) experiments were used. The CBC survey method involves presenting respondents with several hypothetical scenarios that include numerous combinations of compensation attributes. The survey sample was recruited through web-based panels run by a marketing firm. The online survey was designed and built in the Sawtooth Software platform. Conjoint analysis was carried out.

The conjoint analysis results show that among the different compensation attributes, consumers preferred discounts the most, followed by corrective actions and loyalty points. Among the discount levels, consumers favored “free one night certificate for a future stay” over “100 percent off one night’s room bill.” Regarding loyalty points, consumers desire more points than fewer points. In terms of correction levels, consumers appear to desire an “upgrade to a suite” over just moving to another room or having the original room cleaned. Moreover, consumers prefer that service recovery be handled by upper-level management.

Several limitations should be discussed. For example, the type of service failure studied was limited to a booked room not being clean upon check-in. Different types and magnitudes of service failures may result in a different set of preferences for compensation bundles. In addition, the compensation attributes and levels were limited in scope even though they were obtained from interviews with managers at midsize hotels. Other attributes and attribute levels can be included in future studies.

Although an abundant number of studies have been done regarding service failure and recovery, the extent to which service recovery needs to be carried out before it translates into actual recovery remains unanswered. Using conjoint analysis, the study identified exactly which bundle of compensation items was most preferred by guests.

Information technology (IT) has become a strategic weapon on tourism products’ identification, presentation, dissemination and getting a sustainable competitive advantage. Tourism management is the most important candidate for using IT with the need for gathering information in large quantities and diffusion of tourism management. The heterogeneous nature of these businesses means that information-communication Technologies’ uses change from sector to sector and from management to management in the tourism sector. The development of IT has created new application areas for tourism industry managers especially in efficient cooperation and provided tools for real globalization, IT is unexpectedly part of tourism management because of information creation processing and transmission which are important in daily activities. Therefore, both rapid development of tourism demand and tourism supply have become a compulsory partner of IT; and for this reason, IT plays an important role in the tourism marketing, distribution, promotion, and coordination. Due to this importance; the impact of IT on tourism sector is valued to be investigated. This chapter stresses that IT’s uses play an efficient role in choosing the management on behalf of the consumer. Within this context, this chapter composes of the information society; IT development and tourism; the usage of IT on travel, hospitality, tourism sector, its challenges, and advantages. This chapter mostly emphasizes on these subjects that will be examined deeply.

The purpose of this paper is to show how, in planning and building a new library at a US‐style higher education institution in the Middle East, special attention was paid to the need to encourage and enhance student information literacy competencies. This was a core purpose behind the building design, activity zones and Information Commons layout.

Librarians visited a wide range of academic libraries in the USA and Canada as a means of benchmarking best practice in space and building design. Extensive feedback was also gathered from the campus community and their desires reflected in the final design.

The library classrooms and adjacent Information Commons are key components in facilitating student information literacy skills.

Student attainment of core information literacy skills can be facilitated and enhanced through library facility design, particularly through the careful placement of instruction classrooms and a central computing or information commons area.

The paper shows how planning a new library at a US‐style higher education institution in the Middle East incorporated the need to encourage and enhance student information literacy competencies

The concept of the focused factory is well known and accepted in manufacturing industries. It is argued that the same concept can and should be applied in service industries as well. The differences between a service and manufactured product, however, cause some specific problems with respect to focusing. These problems are the variance among firms within a certain service sector, customer participation, the variability of customer needs, the need for consistency among the various elements of the service encounter, and the difference between the front and the back office. Some recommendations are made to cope with these problems.