An investigation into guests' perceived service quality of the bed-and-breakfast and guest house market industry in the Nelson Mandela Bay area

The tourism and hospitality industry has made a meaningful contribution to the development of the South African economy. Not only the hotels, but also the demand for self-catering holiday properties such as guest houses and bed-and-breakfast (B&B) establishments is increasing which could boost the tourist industry. Moreover, the prospect of the self-catering holiday properties in South Africa is extremely positive, particularly when the country is given the opportunity to hold the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Thus, expectations and perceptions are significantly shaped and transformed by the prosperous environment. The self-catering holiday properties should provide the best possible service to international and domestic tourists and ensure that their needs are fully met. The general purpose of this study was to evaluate the service quality of guest houses and B&Bs in the Nelson Mandela Bay by comparing guests’ expectations and perceptions. The results of this study could assist the managers of guest house and B&B in improving its service performance to more effectively fulfil the needs of dynamic tourist market. The literature study provided an overview of tourism industry from the management and marketing perspectives, services marketing and a detailed discussion of service quality focusing on the nature of services, determinants of service quality and techniques for measuring service quality. The SERVQUAL model and its derivative, Lodging Quality Index (LQI), were adapted for measuring the guests’ perceived service quality in this research. ii The empirical data was collected by means of a survey, using a self-administered questionnaire distributed to guests who were staying at guest houses or B&Bs in the Nelson Mandela Bay identified in terms of convenience sampling. One hundred and five useable questionnaires were received. The empirical findings based on the perception-minus-expectation (P-E) gap analysis showed that the perception mean scores were consistently lower than the expectation mean scores. This implies that guests perceived service quality of guest house and B&B to be relatively low. It is recommended that the managers of guest houses and B&Bs should: {u10007A} uniform the employees; {u10007A} use every tool to figure out what the guest wants; {u10007A} establish specific working procedures and help employees to understand their job responsibilities and mangers’ expectations; {u10007A} invite suggestions of existing located facilities from guests, and move the inconvenient facilities if possible; {u10007A} employ a communication audit to evaluate the overall quality of the communication system by comparing communication objectives to actual performance; {u10007A} combine useful destination information from different sources and update them on the website frequently; and {u10007A} apply an attracting layout to build positive image