Hotel businesses have an important place in the tourism sector. Hotel businesses want better customer service by meeting their demands and expectations, thus attracting more customers than rival businesses. One of the most critical factors in tourism enterprises' customer competition is providing quality service. For this purpose, it can benefit from the Kano model. The Kano model is a practical approach that tries to understand customer satisfaction by categorizing the expectations of the customers. In the study, the Kano model was applied in the hotels of a hotel chain in Istanbul. In addition, the average satisfaction coefficient (ASC) values were calculated to determine the important levels of service qualities. According to the results obtained, it has been observed that customer expectations are in the one-dimensional (O) and attractive (A) categories. In addition, the reception staff's importance of customer privacy was the most valued service quality by the customers.
TopIntroduction
Hotel businesses are considered an essential element of the tourism industry, as they meet the most important of the most basic needs of tourists, namely accommodation service (Prabhu et al., 2020). It is crucial hotels offer other services to their customers besides accommodation. Other services such as Playgrounds, tennis, restaurants, sauna, bar, and swimming pools are also crucial for customers (Anwar, 2017). With the increasing competition in the tourism sector, customer satisfaction has become an essential issue for hotels. They aim to provide better service for businesses by considering customer satisfaction. Improving service quality in a competitive market is an important tool to stay in the sector (Atalan, 2020). The service quality offered by the hotels to their customers is successful only if the expectations of their guests are met. Hotel businesses can satisfy customers by providing high-quality service in the competitive market (Top & Ali, 2021). The increasing number of service enterprises in the sector daily and the fact that companies compete with each other have led many companies to carry out new studies to increase the quality of service they provide to their customers. The reason why companies in the service sector attach importance to quality is that companies have grasped the connection between success rates and service quality (Demirbağ & Çavdar, 2012). Companies that provide a high rate of goods and services to their customers have a higher market share than companies that offer a lower level (Göral & Çağliyan, 2019; Sofyalıoğlu & Tunail, 2012).
It has been observed that accommodation companies, one of the essential parts of the service sector in the developing economy, are in a highly competitive environment with each other (Dönmez & Atalan, 2018). With the increasingly competitive environment, the efforts of the companies in the service sector to try to satisfy them financially encourage them to increase the quality of service they offer (Ahmad, 2017; Akbaba, 2006; Berger et al., 1993).
Another important factor in hotel businesses is customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is directly related to customer satisfaction (Setó-Pamies, 2012). Loyalty is essential for hotel businesses since it is accepted that there is a direct relationship between customer loyalty and firms' profitability (Graham, 1995; Reichheld & Sasser, 1990). Since loyal customers are less price sensitive, it is a very influential factor in the profitability of companies. In addition, they increase the existing customer potential of the companies because they directly recommend the services they receive to their environment (Bowen & Chen, 2001; Nam et al., 2011). Since service quality, customer loyalty, and customer satisfaction are crucial for hotel businesses, the necessity of being in contact with their customers causes them to pay attention to providing higher quality service compared to companies in other sectors (Atalan & Atalan, 2022). Businesses in the service sector try not to lose their customers to their competitors by providing customer loyalty with the quality services they offer to their customers (H. T. Chen & Chen, 2015; Gupta & Srivastava, 2012). Hotel businesses are becoming more assertive in the market by constantly considering the needs of their customers and increasing their service quality and reliability. In this context, a study using the Kano model in Taiwan shows that service quality needs to be improved in a competitive market (M.-C. Chen et al., 2019).