HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Hospitality Industry Competitive Advantage



Hospitality Industry Competitive Advantage

Introduction

An organization's ability to creatively utilise its service personnel to augment the value of its service offerings constitutes a critical competitive strategy. However, the authors indicate that an empowerment strategy alone may not prove capable of providing an organization with a competitive advantage. Moreover, the uniqueness of the empowerment strategy is founded on its ability to complement and support both the employees and the management activities within the organisation.

Both the manufacturing and service literatures seem to imply that focus is a good thing and that focusing operations are an important means of gaining competitive advantage. However, some service organisations may not have the opportunity or desire to focus on a targeted set of customers or limited set of services. The success of hypermarkets is based upon their lack of focus. Multi-screen cinemas are designed to provide a wide range of services for a wide range of markets.

Service guarantees create a customer-driven standard. Moreover, a service guarantee constitutes a tourism organization's ''blueprint of standard'' that defines the service promise to its internal and external customers simultaneously. Service guarantees not only set the criteria for customers to evaluate the quality of service they receive, but they clearly establish the standard to which an organization needs to train its workers, to ensure that staff are capable of delivering premium quality service (Maher, 2001:48). This paper discusses the competitive advantage gain in reference to hospitality indusrtry, hotels.

Discussion

The service guarantee therefore maintains both a marketing and operational function (Kandampully 2008b:16) that will simultaneously enhance an organization's internal and external marketing effectiveness and operating competency. However, the marketing effectiveness and operational competency of an organization dictates customer satisfaction. ''By knowing what your customer's wants are, and meeting those wants, you create a unity of expectations between customer and employee, providing employees with a very clear focus'' (Rose, 2000:46). In an effort to encourage both positive and negative feedback, Kandampully and Butler (2008:12) propose the use of a reward system directed at both customers and employees. Thus, it can be argued that service guarantees facilitate feedback, ensure customers are rewarded for their comments, and effectively compel the organization to respond to customer feedback. Research conducted by Sowder (2006:77) and by Evans et al. (2006:11) claims that tourism organizations that are willing to offer a service guarantee, and also prove capable of delivering on that promise, will gain a powerful competitive advantage.

Hayes and Wheelwright (2004:78), for example, identified focus as a key element of a firm's manufacturing strategy; 'an effective strategy usually requires concentrating one's activity, effort or attention on a fairly narrow range of pursuits. Focusing on these chosen activities implicitly reduces the resources available for other activities.' Hayes and Wheelwright identified four dimensions of focus, the markets served, the production volumes of different products, the degree of product customisation required, and the nature of the process technology employed.

Moreover, a service guarantee strategy constitutes an uncompromisable service standard, implemented as a strategy to ensure effective functioning of the ...