Introduction
In the hospitality industry, receiving and handling customers is among the most fundamental shores that facilitate the attainment of business progress and expansion.
Essentially, customer satisfaction is attained through delivering quality services where the value of money paid by the customers is apparent (Gustafsson, Johnson, & Roos, 2006). Quality assurance is a reliable focal point when guaranteeing that standard services are achieved.
It refers to sequentially planned activities that are meant to meet the customers’ demands without compromising the quality. To provide quality services, the organizations strengthen two vital business pillars.
Quality control and design of goods and services are the two key pillars that determine the success of a business especially in the hospitality industry. In essence, the amount of money paid by the clients may create distinct handling and extra services between hotels and customers.
Most hotels are able to set their standards which determine the number of customers they receive as well as their returns (Rust & Zahorik, 1993). The variation on how to treat guests is usually reliant of the payment, location, management, employees, organizational goal, and customer personalities.
This research analyses whether the wellbeing of guests are similar between the Twelve Apostles and Hotel d Angleterre present similar handling and care to their clients.
Conceptual framework
An effective quality management system will benefit the organization (Andrews, 2008). Since the corner stone of a good quality management system is the harmonic relationship between the customer and supplier, the organization establishes a customer supplier interface that extends into and outside of the hotel.
This means that the hotel must not only consider the immediate customers, but also put into consideration the potential customer.
For an efficient and effective relationship to be established, the management system must identify the relevant component. In this case, the components are the customer’s need and organization requirement.
Customer’s requirement relates to level of confidence of an organization in delivering the expected services and goods in a consistent manner while the organization requirement will refers to combination of resources in a cost effective manner that seeks to maximize the company revenue generating ability (Ingold, 2006).
Many scholars from various lines of specialization have carried out studies and researches about the subject of flexibility in a system especially information system. Fundamentally, they have come into conclusion that there is no optimal level of flexibility in any business activity (Watson, 2002).
On the other hand, it is clear that there is a direct relationship between flexibility and efficiency of the system functioning which can be likened to functioning of a manufacturing system. This means that there are no universal standards of establishing the level of flexibility.
An extremely flexible system has proved to have negative effects on the overall hotel performance. This is a similar case to restrictive system. A restrictive system bars the users from accessing majority information while the flexible system overwhelms the user.
Therefore, no meaningful conclusion can be made by the user (Rutherford, 2002). Scholars have arrived into an agreement that setting of flexibility level of these systems is not realistic. However, guidelines have been developed to direct the flexibility of the hotels.
Methodology
This research applied the prevailing advancement in information technology to collect reliable information from relevant participants (Sheela, 2002).
In order to understand how quests are treated between the 2 hotels placed at different locations within the globe, the approved reviews from the booking.com websites were applied. These reviews are only left by verified visitors of the two subject hotels.
Booking.com website ensures that the people making the reviews have visited and resided in their hotels in order to prevent any form of spamming. In this consideration, the arguments related to the Hotel d Angleterre were related to 173 reviews left by 173 clients.
These reviews were then evaluated in order to reveal the various ideologies depicting how clients were handled and the associated satisfaction. A similar collection of review data was performed on the Twelve Apostles hotel where 47 clients had left review on booking.com.
The evaluations of the two hotels were compared to reveal their similarities of taking care of the customers well being. Essentially, the reviewer who had made several visits to the hotels was allowed to make several reviews after their individual visits.
Data Used and Collected
The data retrieved from the reviews posted on the booking.com website were used to answer the research question.
There were forty seven reviewers for the Twelve Apostles hotel and one hundred and seventy threes participants on the Hotel d Angleterre who made suggestion, comments, and complaints about the overall appearance of the facility among other things.
Furthermore, the records for the rating and the level of such aspects as cleanliness, comfort, number of staff, value of money, facilities available, and location were recorded as well.
Instrument Used
The data collection applied several minor instruments to access and record the data from the hotels. A laptop was used to access the data from the websites through the use of internet. The information was recorded and arranged using table on an excel sheet.
Results
Hotel d’Angleterre hotel
This hotel had a rating of 9.3 to a scale of ten. The ratings of other aspects within the hotels are presented on the figure 1. The positive feedbacks released by the customers were tremendous. In fact, the clients seems overwhelmed by all the strategic positioning and treatment from the hotel operatives.
For instance a customer named Rashad from the USA indicates that everything was perfect including the professionalism of the staff. Another customer by the name Tomeika recites this fact indicating, “The hotel staff was so friendly and attentive. I felt like royalty.”
More than 90% of these replies and reviews from the clients commended the work done by the hotel. They cited strategic location, attentive staff, good maintenance, and the resources within it. However, some clients argued the Wi-Fi was slow to connect into internet services.
In other case, they pointed out that the lifts were small and the prices of the rooms were high. The efficiency and effectiveness of a quality management system enables the organization to meet its obligation. This aspect is made possible due to the fact that the system can interact with all segments of the organization.
In doing this, the system helps the decision and policy makers in identifying customer specification and desires. This, in turn, put in place measures that will enhance the organization in meeting the customer need.
This system will help in raising the morale of the employees, facilitate further training in areas where there are weakness, lowering the operational costs of the organization, boosting the hotel ability to increase its market share, minimizing wastage of resources that lead to optimization, incorporate staff input, facilitate improvement of system control and establish the hotel general direction.
Twelve Apostles
The Twelve Apostles has somewhat similar treatments from the clients. It is a 5 star hotel with a rating of 8.3 in a scale of 10. In fact, the only distinction clear from the survey involves the location.
The apparent issues were related to the location where most customers cited the view the lake as the most convenient position for their holidays. The staff had welcomed the customers in a satisfying way as described by Amanda from the United Kingdom.
Amanda indicates, “We received a very warm welcome and the service was superb throughout our stay.” Amanda like most other reviewers informs that she was satisfied by the location and beauty of the rooms.
However, about 20% of the clients complained about the prices, room size, low privacy, lack of some lifts, and the waiting time. Most clients were not satisfied by the attention they received during the busy weekends and other days when they had to queue and wait.
The Twelve Apostles hotel runs an electronic system to handle its routine and semi-routine activities. The coordination of activities is conducted from a central station. The occupant of the central station is the system controller who reports to the general/operation manager of the hotel.
These are operational substation, bookkeeping and reservation, customer’s feedback and human capital monitoring. Bookkeeping and reservation is the station that is responsible for receiving booking, developing vacant room list and allocating room.
This center is, also, responsible for payment for the rooms. Human capital monitoring is the station that handles the manual work. This station comprises of a supervisors who is tasked to ensure that the rooms are inspected physically to ensure they meet the recommended standards of preparation.
The station, also, ensures that customer indoor orders are met within the shortest time possible. Also, this station ensures that the customer luggage is delivered on time after relevant security checks. Customer feedback station is responsible for the well being of the customers.
This station evaluates customers’ complaints and compliments. The station is, also, responsible for evaluating the efficiency of the employee since they give the feedback relating to the quality of service rendered by the specific employee.
They have a wide range of room types that accommodate people according to their needs and willingness to pay. This allows different prices for rooms and facilitates prevention of conflicts. However, this does not imply that customer did not apply the strategy price.
Analysis
According to Gustafsson, Johnson, & Roos (2006), the departments that handle revenue management take the responsibility of facilitating rate parity to depict prevalence of integrity. In some other instances, it was found that hotel rates could exceed the rating of Booking.com.
The art of field management has a critical and unexceptional strategy of regulating the outcomes of any profit making organization. Apparently, the strategies of pricing were a fundamental aspect in this research. Running a hotel relies significantly on the income that arises after delivering a service and renting rooms.
According to a postulation made by Chen (2010), pricing is a critical tool of running and regulating the progress of a hotel. Chen argued that hotels depict fixed capacity, perishable inventory, fixed high costs, and minimal variable costs. Variation of prices is another factor that alters the satisfaction of customer.
Lockyer (2007) had noted that conflicts could arise as a result of distinct prices between consecutive days. The description made by Lockyer depicted a huge difference between prices of two consequent days. This is a possible cause of conflicts in a hotel.
However, this research identified that booking warrants rooms with known prices. For instance, a customer is only able to book a room after paying. This guarantees the absence of conflicts related to prices variations for every day. However, if the customer wishes to stay longer than the booked time, s/he has to book again.
Policies of a hotel regulate the activities and the decision that a hotel undertakes. Customer management must lay its basis on policies. For instance, conflicts involving the higher price for some customer than others could be solved by providing the hotel policies on loyalty programs.
Loyal customers are accorded special treatment (Noone & Renaghan, 2003). The hotels reduced prices and offered points to these customer. However, the most prevalent strategy involves the use of point allocation.
Why use points instead of prices reduction? This strategy allows setting of similar prices to all customers. The appreciation is allocated as points which are changed in favor of the loyal customer. This solves the conflict that could arise due to pricing differences.
We cannot skip the use of CTA and MLOS application in YM. Customer, also, feel exempted and unappreciated when they come to book. Kimes (2002) postulated that length of stay could lead to discrimination.
Twelve Apostles hotel depicted that customer who are to stay longer provide the hotels higher income with a single transaction. These hotels could, therefore, discriminate customers who are to stay for shorter periods and give priority to those who stay longer.
Conclusion
Apparently, the results of this research have indicated that multidimensional responses to this question. Managers considered several aspects when managing room prices.
These aspects will be discussed in terms of location, occupancy and room rate, pricing strategies, price adjustment strategies, segmentation, human resources, customer management and third party websites.
The findings of this research proved that location lead to variation of room prices. Lowering of their room rates allowed the customers to prefer the low charges which in turn lead to revenues from other services offered in the hotel. In this case, demand was the factor that determined how low or high the prices of room were to be.
Room revenues were, also, managed by regulating the occupancy. For instance, it has been stated that occupancy was a key reliance for hotels that do not have high demand. They must to lower their prices to accommodate many customers.
When the demand of hotels rises to 100%, the prices attain their highest level since there is no need to pay much attention to occupancy. At this point, the administrator took advantage to raise the prices to the maximum.
Also, the hotels that did not have many customers had the fervency to request customers from other hotels. Pricing determines the revenues that the hotels achieved from the rooms. Too high rating could have resulted to total rejection from the customers.
On the other hand, if the room rates were reduce to levels that were too low, the hotel was prone to loss and failure to apply YM strategies that emphasizes on income. The techniques of pricing, such as discounting, played vital roles in customer satisfaction.
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