Service quality and customer loyalty in four-star hotels of Shiraz

The chief goal of hotels is to satisfy and retain their customers. Previous researches have shown that contented hotel guests are more likely to revisit a hotel than guests who were somehow dissatisfied. This study attempts to scrutinize the relationship between service quality perceptions and customer loyalty in the hotels located in the city of Shiraz. The other specific purposes of this study are the following: 1) to investigate the perceived service quality and customer loyalty in hotels of Shiraz, 2) to scrutinize relations between service quality and customer loyalty dimensions, and 3) to provide suggestions to improve service quality and customer loyalty in the four-star hotels of Shiraz. In this research, perceived service quality was measured through five dimensions of SERVQUAL (tangibles, reliability, assurance, responsiveness, and empathy) developed byParasuraman et al. (1988). Also, customer loyalty was measured by the questionnaire developed by Skogland and Siguaw (2004). Afterwards, 196 questionnaires were collected and analyzed using Kolmogorov- Smirnov (K-S) test, Spearman correlation coefficient, and Binomial Test. Results demonstrated a strong correlation betweenservice quality perceptions and customer’s loyalty. Furthermore, among the 5 dimensions of Servqual (tangibles, reliability, assurance, responsiveness, and empathy), the tangibles dimension showed the least correlation with customer loyalty, emphasizing more importance on human elements of service quality.