Chapter 9 Measuring Quality

This chapter covers four main concepts: service quality, quality assurance for measurement, quality assurance for management, and service failure and recovery. The first section mainly discusses the fundamentals of service quality. The service quality gap model is also highlighted to identify the gaps between customer expectations and the actual perceptions of service at different stages of service delivery. In the second section, different measurement methods for quality assurance are demonstrated. Examples of qualitative and quantitative methods are included. In the third section, the important management objectives of quality assurance, improvement, and control are covered. By using a combination of the quality assurance methods from the second section, hospitality operators can accomplish internal accountability, external accountability, performance improvement, and innovation. In the fourth and final section, causes and consequences of service failures are covered together with the service recovery paradox to express the implications of poor quality.