Tanco Travel Agency Ltd

Tanco Travel Agency Ltd

Name of the Writer

Name of the Institution

Tanco Travel Agency Ltd

Introduction

Nowadays, competition is increasing immensely in every industry; particularly in the service industry such as travel agency. With the increase in competition, the problems also drastically increase in travel agencies. This industry is associated with service sector and the business growth or success depends highly on the quality of service, because of its impact on customer satisfaction, financial performance, and customer retention.

According to Fick and Ritchie (1991, pp. 2-9), one of the key success factors of travel and tourism industry is the high service quality. Travel agencies require evaluating their service quality on a continuous basis in order to assess service quality level, and compare it with the travel and tourism industry in order to take competitive advantage over their competitors. Furthermore, continuous assessment of service quality tends to be the key driver for the improvement of service quality.

For better understanding, this paper illustrates the issue faced by Tanco Travel Agency Ltd. related to quality of service, as well as its effect on their business. Many researchers (Ryan and Cliff, 1997, pp. 1-32; Lam and Zhang, 1999, pp. 341-349; Johns et al., 2004, pp. 82-100) identify that most all travel agencies use the approach of SERVQUAL to improve the service quality.

Discussion

Few years back, Tanco Travel Agency Ltd received a number of complaints from customers regarding the service quality, which lead to customer dissatisfaction. Increasing customer dissatisfaction is an alarm for Tanco Travel Agency, because it starts affecting business profitability, becomes hurdle in customer retention, diminishing the image of travel agency, as well as sustainability of business.

In order to address, this problem Tanco Travel Agency Ltd decided to investigate the service quality of their agency. The agency employed SERVQUAL and establishes some tools to identify the level of service quality for last four months, and the agency surveyed 100 customers. For the evaluation of service quality Tanco Travel Agency selected nine factors of service quality such as accessibility, competitiveness, competence, confidentiality, courtesy, corporate image, physical evidence, responsiveness, and timeliness (Parasuraman et al. 1985, 1988, p. 4150). The results demonstrate a single aspect or dimension, or no scope and depth with regard to service quality problem. Research (Babakus and Mangold, 1992, pp. 767- 786) asserted that uni-dimensionality makes it almost impossible to achieve excellence in service quality because of no depth. The regression analysis of this investigation showed that the service quality is diminishing the corporate image of Tanco Travel Agency Ltd. Furthermore, the customer complaints data shows that the factor most contributed in decline of service quality were ambient conditions and timeliness.

Additionally, external factors also contribute in the decline of service quality. The dynamic competition resulted in increased demands of customers. Another factor was the rigid policies of governments that highly contribute in delaying the process causing customer dissatisfaction (Bamford & Xystouri, 2005, pp. 306-322).

The management of Tanco Travel Agency Ltd to re-build their corporate image through encountering the customer dissatisfaction by triggering the ...