A Model for Benchmarking Service Quality: Small hotels on the periphery

Tourism is a highly significant part of the global economy, and it has been increasingly recognised over the last few decades that the success of an organisation within the industry depends on the standard of service provided (Augustyn and Ho, 1998). Models for measuring service quality have been widely used over this period (Parasuraman, 1988; Edvardsson et al, 1997; Brooks et al., 1999; Frost and Kumar 2000) and they have been applied to the hotel sector with good results (Wilson 2008). Benchmarking, described as “the search for industry best practices that will lead to superior performance” Camp (1989), has been used as a tool for quality improvement in industries as diverse as motor manufacture and banking and in a limited way to the hotel sector (Cano et al 2001). This paper presents a conceptual model which combines service quality tools and benchmarking for improving the quality of service delivery within small enterprises in the hotel sector.