Psychometrics Of Hotel Service Quality: Comparative Factor Structures Of Alternative Market Segments

Abstract

When different market segments are encountered, can the same instrument be used to understand and predict the determinants of customer perceptions of service quality, satisfaction and retention?  This paper analyzes a national sample of over 18,000 U.S. customer surveys regarding hotel experiences in a range of properties from budget to near-luxury accommodations.  Its purpose is to examine the dimensionality of customer satisfaction for business vs. pleasure travelers, and male vs. female guests, in order to determine the appropriateness of conceptualizing and measuring service quality with the same instrument for these potentially divergent segments.  Our findings provide good evidence of factor stability across these segments, using the multi-item scales that are employed by one of the largest privately held hotel chains in the United States.  Within the common factor structure, modest but intuitively reasonable differences in the importance of service attributes in determining customer loyalty for different segments do emerge.