THE QUALITY OF HUMAN RESOURCES – A REQUEST FOR HOTEL INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT. A THEORETICAL APPROACH

In this article we focus on the importance of human resource quality from hotel industry in obtaining quality services and further more in obtaining hotel industry development. We address this issue due to the fact that, usually, when talking about tourism or hotel industry development, the literature in the field offers macro solutions like, infrastructure development, service/product development and/or improving service quality. We consider that a micro approach is also important and from this perspective, we emphasis the role of human resource quality for industry development. The quality of human resources, as a dimension of service quality was not detailed extensively by the literature in the field but we found it relevant for hotel industry development, as this industry it is a service industry, and as Ritz-Carlton Company’s motto say “service comes only from people”. We discuss some aspects about the frequency of human resource quality dimension in the quality measurement models and then we detail its’ dimensions. The three dimensions presented in this article are: “competence”, “physical appearance” and “behaviour and attitude”. For “behaviour and attitude” subdimension we identified some patterns in measuring studies and it looks like responsiveness, friendliness, empathy and service personalisation are the most used terms. Even though these dimensions were the results of literature review and are not empirical validated, we consider being helpful for future research in the field.