Business excellence for the Hong Kong hotel industry.

The purpose of this research is to understand the state of art of total quality management in Hong Kong Hotel Industry and to develop a model of business excellence to help monitor and guide hoteliers in search of excellence. With this in mind, a preliminary study was conducted to understand the concepts, management practices, barriers to their implementations and future plan that are pertinent to total quality management. Founded on Kanji's Business Excellence Model, the Business Excellence Model for Hong Kong Hotel Industry is developed, tested and applied using survey data from 28 members of the Hong Kong Hotels Association and the questionnaires are mainly responded by directorates of the hotels. To compliment the business excellence study, over 2,400 interviews were made from guests of 62 hotels to set up a customer satisfaction index for Hong Kong Hotel Industry. A full-scale study on customer satisfaction for three international and two Asian hotels is included as a case study. Five critical success factors are identified in the preliminary study and they are People Management, External Customer-Satisfaction, Teamwork, Internal Customer-Satisfaction and Leadership. Under staffing is the major barrier to the hotel's implementation of TQM in terms of both frequency and degrees of difficulty, and the approach believed to be short-lived gimmicks or fads comes second. The customer satisfaction survey 1999 reveals that Customer Satisfaction is mainly influenced by both Expectation and Perceived Quality. This, perhaps, gives the hoteliers the starting points for improving their customer satisfactions. Contrasts between the two groups of hotels in the case study reveal that the Asian group outperforms the International group of hotels in all the five dimensions of the Customer Satisfaction Model for both sexes and for both ethnic groups of White and Chinese. This indicates that the difference is something fundamental, perhaps in their quality cultures, quality initiatives and, most importantly, leaderships.