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Introduction
Services are considered to be primarily experiential as they are intangible, hence, difficult to measure. The hotel is accommodation and a part of the service industry and hoteliers are required to be aware of the principles of service marketing (Lee and Cheng, 2018; Razalli, 2008). Hotels pursue customer loyalty by providing service quality and meeting their expectations and anticipations. Therefore, hoteliers need to know about their customers’ expectations and try to meet their needs (Han and Hyun, 2017). According to Wu and Ko (2013), the hotel industry has problems in measuring and improving their service performances from a customer’s viewpoint due to the lack of an integrative conceptual model and measurement scale. Based on Lin (2005), hotels which fail to perceive and meet their customers’ expectations would be out of the market between seven and nine years.
Poor service quality contributes to losing an average of 12 percent of the customers (Riscinto-Kozub, 2008). Service quality is the key to a hotel’s ability to differentiate itself from its competitors and gain customer loyalty (Kim et al., 2008; Choi and Kim, 2013). Loyalty has become the most important strategic aim in today’s competitive business environment (Chai et al., 2015; Gursoy et al., 2014; Oliver, 1999). Reichheld and Sasser (1989) argued that an increase of 2 percent of customers who purchase again can help an organization to decrease its costs by 10 percent, because 60 percent of new customers are attracted by word-of-mouth. A loyal customer in luxury hotels, for example, both returns and spreads positive words-of-mouth recommendation about the hotel to a median of ten people having a net present value of more than $100,000 (Kotler et al., 1999). However, Berezina et al. (2012) declared that the customers might not like to revisit the hotel because of the following reasons: first, the customer did not enjoy the trip to this destination and preferred to look for a new area. Second, the customer is interested to try new events from the other hotels. Third, they are affected by the price and service quality from the other hotels.
One of the important sources of income in Malaysia is the tourism industry (Salleh et al., 2016). The hotel industry is one of the important...