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The ability to provide high quality customer service and to deliver customer value is critical to attracting customers in the competitive tourism service environment. This research seeks to explore whether the instrument developed by Zeithaml et al. (1990), referred to as SERVQUAL, can be applied to a tourism service business to provide a quantifiable method of measuring service quality. An adaptation of SERVQUAL was applied to a business operating tours through a brewery in Tasmania, Australia. The instrument proved to be adequately internally reliable and provided apparently useful and easily interpretable diagnostic data to the management of the business. It was concluded that SERVQUAL has the potential to be a useful management tool provided care is taken to adapt the instrument to the individual needs of the user while remaining within the underlying theoretical framework. Adaptation and simplification of the complicated instrument provides small tourism businesses with a new way of gaining theory-based diagnostic data that can be self-administered by management on an ongoing basis and is not a burden to the customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the great importance of the "information business" in the tourism industry, the Internet has seen increasing use in this field. This paper deals with the evaluation of Internet portals based on the example of the Austrian National Tourist Office, Austria's largest tourism service organization. The empirical analyses performed on the basis of 172 useable questionnaires demonstrate the high significance of the Internet in the work processes of tourism professionals. In this context, significant differences were identified between the four user groups examined in the B2B field (provincial tourism organizations, hotels, travel agencies/operators and associations) and between age groups and genders in the various dimensions of Internet portal evaluation. Usability and content play the most critical role as factors influencing the appeal of Internet portals, the users' satisfaction with them, and their frequency of return visits to a portal. The design of a portal has a significantly lower influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile business applications in tourism have been developed in the last years for various platforms and services. However, most of the applications have been tested in lab-like conditions. The article describes the trial case of St. Moritz, Switzerland. With the help of the Destination-Pilot acceptability, usability, and market potential for mobile information services have been tested in a real environment situation. The trial involves numerous visitors and tourist enterprises. The paper presents opportunities and limitations to so called mobile travel recommender systems. Strong emphasis is put on the methodical and technical challenges in the set up trial phase as well as on potential business models for exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hotel industry has a hard time resisting the continued globalization pressure. In order to survive the fierce international competition, even hotel chains need to offer their potential customers an added value that they do not receive from their competitors. The product development offers promising integrated solution approaches. Numerous unique characteristics can be established through entrepreneurial implementation of innovative product concepts in hotel operations. Indicating that this can occur in the fullest sense, this theoretical article concludes with an actual product development. Its objective is to demonstrate that the integration of the resource-based view in the product development processes in hospitality and tourism is necessary to generate competitive differentiation opportunities. Environment-based and resource-based views are no longer interpreted as monistic and mutually exclusive, but as complementary management approaches. A practical example underlines the fact that such considerations are already being implemented in hotel chains although they still tend to be neglected in tourism-scientific research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the importance of innovation as a key component of business strategy in tourism, as well as determinants of innovation processes in the small and medium sized hotel industry in alpine tourism destinations of Europe. Initially, the paper delivers a literature overview on innovations as prerequisites for competitive advantages. Furthermore, the authors shed more light on the measurement of innovation in the tourism industry. The empirical study has been carried out in alpine tourism destinations focusing on the assessment of innovation activities in small and medium sized (SMEs) hotels. Diverse functional areas of hotels have been analysed and the results show rather low degrees of innovation in all areas of the hotel value chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The failure rate of new service projects is high, because the knowledge about how innovations should be developed is limited. In the last decade, several studies have investigated the success factors associated with service innovations (e.g., Atuahene-Gima, 1996; de Brentani, 2001; Storey and Easingwood, 1998). However, no research in new service development (NSD) has addressed the question of whether chain affiliated and independently operated service firms have different approaches for developing successful innovations. The majority of past new service development (NSD) success studies have concentrated on the financial service sector, which is generally represented by large corporate organizations. The findings of this study indicate that the factors which impact on the performance of NSD depend on the organizational relationship of hotels-chain affiliation or independent operation. The study's results suggest that market attractiveness, process management, market responsiveness and empowerment predict NSD success within chain affiliated hotels. While empowerment and market attractiveness are also related to NSD success in independent hotels, this is also linked to effective marketing communication, employee commitment, behaviour based evaluation, training of employees and marketing synergy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper reviews the innovation literature related to tourism and examines the twin problems of operational definitions and measurement of innovation in the tourism sector. A conceptual model is then proposed by which the most relevant aspects of innovation and the most relevant aspects of the "tourism experience" can be integrated conceptually, and which can guide the development of related operational definitions and measurements and lead to a standardization of, and therefore an ability to aggregate, tourism innovation statistics across products, providers, markets and geopolitical regions. The model first categorizes innovations along two dimensions: an "invention-adoption" continuum and an "impact-on-the-tourism-experience" dimension, which includes accessibility, affective transformation, convenience and value. How the use of these categories can direct attention to important definitional and measurement issues are discussed as is how their use can improve the comparability of tourism innovation data collected from disparate sources. Finally, a third dimension, the economic impact of the innovation, is introduced to the model. The paper concludes with implications and guidelines for future research aimed at validating the model described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tourism product is a composite one with its production, distribution and marketing being configured along a value chain involving many activities which are vertically, horizontally and diagonally related and integrated in varying degrees. Both orthodox and non-orthodox economists agree that innovations will only be undertaken when there is a sufficiently high innovation dividend which pays for the added cost and risk of innovation. Thus profitability appears to be the strongest explanatory variable both behind investment and innovation. Based on the notion that expected profitability from innovation can serve as the primary independent variable determining innovation behaviour across different economic sectors and/or sub branches of tourism, the paper sets out to establish the innovation potential for each of the tourism value creating economic activities from the provision of information to prospective customers (tourists) in the sending region to post-trip (after sale) services. In addition to the usual profit-generating forces of costs and revenues, such dimensions as firm size and economics of scale, proximity to relevant science and technology (know-how for innovation) through human capital and forms of organisation (e.g., network-organisation and/or clusters) will equally be taken into consideration. This analysis will therefore help in pinpointing those areas of the tourism value chain where innovations are most likely to occur. The paper concludes with the presentation of a model aimed at empirically testing innovation behaviour across the tourism value chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]