Customer‐driven hotel landscaping design: a case study

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the quality function deployment (QFD) process can be applied to capture and translate spoken and unspoken customer requirements into actionable service features in a hotel landscaping design case. Design/methodology/approach – This study was undertaken with the aim of showing how the QFD methodology could be used to design hotel landscaping. The methodology is a customer‐driven process which integrates customer requirements into every aspect of the design and delivery of products and services. Understanding what the customer desires from a product or service is crucial to the successful design and development of new products and services. Findings – This research illustrates that quality improvement projects can benefit from the QFD process to connect customer requirements to the internal procedures of the organization to exceed customer expectations and create a brand identity. This paper can be used as a case study to demonstrate how the QFD process can be effectively applied in the design of hotel landscaping or similar cases in other services. Originality/value – The literature regarding the application of the QFD process in the hotel and hospitality industry is limited, let alone the application of this process in hotel landscaping design. Hence, the shortage of QFD application in the hotel landscaping design has motivated this unique study of applying the QFD process to landscaping design.