Service Quality in the Hotel Industry When Cultural Contexts Matter

An analysis of 168 critical incidents of service success or failure for seventeen hotels in Hong Kong found that the most common critical incident involved a hotel employee responding to a guest request. That stands in contrast to an earlier study conducted in Western hotels that identified service recovery as the most common critical incident. The analysis is based on interviews with fifty-six front-desk employees in a diverse group of Hong Kong hotels. When it came to service recovery, hotels in Hong Kong were inclined to apply compensatory responses, while earlier studies found that Western hotels favored corrective responses, even when customers preferred compensation. The comparison of Western studies with those of Hong Kong highlight cultural differences with regard to service. One particular difference was employees' assessment of the source of customer dissatisfaction. Whereas respondents in Western studies seemed to cite external causes, the delivery system, or the customers themselves for customer dissatisfaction, the respondents in the Hong Kong study uniformly blamed themselves.