A study of hotel guest perceptions in Mauritius

Abstract

Hotels in Mauritius have faced difficult times during the 1990s because of changing customer demands and increasing competition from other tourist destinations like the Seychelles, the Pacific and Caribbean islands. The country’s hospitality and tourism sectors are trying to augment and offer more than the traditional “sea, sun and sand” concept which, until recently, has formed the core of the tourism product. Hotels have also not responded satisfactorily to the demands of customers owing to lack of management and staff training in service quality. The purpose of this study was to assess customers’ expectations and perceptions of service provided by hotels of Mauritius and to highlight how the service factors were related to customer satisfaction. The hotel managers’ perceptions of tourists’ expectations and the tourists’ actual expectations were also evaluated. Factor analysis with Varimax rotation was carried out and nine service quality dimensions were derived of 39 service attributes. The results also showed that customers’ perceptions of service quality in the hotel industry for Mauritius fell short of their expectations, with the “empathy” dimension having the largest gap.