Measuring Service Quality of Rural Accommodations

Hyunsuk Choi,Duk-Byeong Park,Kwang-Woo Lee,Saehya Ann

doi:10.3390/su10020443

Abstract

The aim of this study is to examine the most important service quality factors for rural accommodations in rural tourism villages in South Korea by simultaneously utilizing Importance–Performance analysis (IPA) and gap analysis. The tabulated results were presented in a two-dimensional grid t showing the strengths and weaknesses of the tourism attributes being studied. Among the 18 items measuring the service quality of rural accommodations, there are no items identified for the concentrate quadrant. Ten items fall in the “Keep up the good work” quadrant, which indicates high performance and importance values. It also includes “the attitude of local residents”, “the attitude of the accommodation’s owner”, and “the expertise of the owner”. Management of rural accommodations in South Korea must make special efforts to maintain and improve service quality for these ten high performance and importance attributes. Gap analysis is used to illustrate how tourism operators can improve their service quality.

Highlights

Service quality has been considered as a main factor to differentiate service products and build a competitiveness in tourism
Service quality in the rural tourism industry has received increasing attention because the generation of income depends on how rural tourism operations provide quality service [4,5,6,7]
Because the measurement of Fleischer et al [15] was rooted in SERVQUAL, the researchers modified the measurement in order to make them more suitable for rural accommodations

Summary

Introduction

Service quality has been considered as a main factor to differentiate service products and build a competitiveness in tourism. The issue of measuring service quality has received increasing attention in the tourism and recreation literature [1,2,3]. Service quality in the rural tourism industry has received increasing attention because the generation of income depends on how rural tourism operations provide quality service [4,5,6,7]. In South Korea, the demand for rural tourism has risen recently. The number of hospitality accommodation units available as tourist accommodation, according to the Rural Development Administration [8], was estimated to be about 13,000 rooms in 4400 farm-stay households. Rural tourism in South Korea is still at an introductory stage that most rural tourists are excursionists with a low rate of overnight stay and short stay

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Conclusion