Service Gaps and Employee Training Fixing Luxury Experiences

The luxury hotel industry faces the challenge to provide excellent service experiences to its customers. This paper aimed to identify service gaps in luxury hotels to confirm the need for employee training. Previous studies emphasized the importance of training and development, to arm employees with the capability to deliver excellent service in a servicescape as part of a Gestalt configuration. To identify service gaps and the need of training, content analysis was used as a method. The analysis had the objective to confirm the assumed guests’ desires of luxury services in the secondary research and identify the significance of employee training to arm human resources to fulfill guests’ expectations. Results indicated that about significant portion of overall comments have reported service failures. This confirmed the need for training in hard skills and soft skills to fix luxury experiences to close the trending service gaps of rudeness, slowness, lack of attention, lack of skills, poor supervision and lack of problemsolving skills