An Application of Quality Function Deployment to the Service Quality of Hot Spring Hotel?An Empirical Study to the Hot Spring Area of Central Taiwan

[[abstract]]Recently, with the popularity of Japanese hot spring culture and the gradual advancement in health concept of Taiwanese, people have been taking advantage of 2-day weekend to engage in hot spring traveling. Taiwan has abundant sources of hot springs. Therefore, the government emphasized the development and construction of spring areas. Many hot-spring hotels have since opened after the devastating 1999 earthquake; the tourism industry has been severely damaged. Since 1999, most tourist spots have regained popularity. The local business owners tried hard to attract customers by offering innovative services on higher quality product. Yet, they often lack scientific method to measure the service quality and to understand the customers? demand. This research tried to apply the Quality Function Development, QFD, traditionally used in production management, to the service industry. Hopefully, our research can help the local businessmen to satisfy customers? demand for quality in the shortest time within possible means.Our main results are the following: 1.Contracted a quality evaluation model for hot-spring hotels in central Taiwan. 2.Measured the service quality gap of such hotels. 3.Translated the demand of service quality to technical demand by QFD. 4.Analyzed the most important quality technology by grey relational analysis (GRA). 5.Offered concrete suggestion for operational management of such hot-spring hotels in central Taiwan