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Top1. Introduction
The hospitality business has grown rapidly along with the globalization. According to JLL’s Hotel & Hospitality Group research in the Hotel Investment Outlook 2016, 2015 was marked as the second highest year on record for hotel transactions around world, posting a confounding growth rate of 50 percent on the prior year. Growing competition among hotels and other continuous industrial pressures resulting from market saturation (Assaf, Jossiasen, Woo, Agbola and Tsionas, 2017).
Various experts have given varying definitions of the concept of customer satisfaction. Kotler and Armstrong (2013) defined customer satisfaction as the extent to which a product’s perceived performance matches a buyer’s expectation. In other words, the customer satisfactions on services offered are intertwined with two main aspects: customer expectations for service quality (expected quality) and the customer perception of the service quality (perceived quality). Furthermore, many literatures have indicated that perceived service quality will lead to the development of the customer loyalty (Markovic, Raspor, Ivankovic, and Planinc, 2010; Rao and Sahu, 2013). Moreover, to be successful and competitive, hotels must be able to provide customers with good service quality which leads to customer satisfaction (Choi and Chu, 2001).
A hotel can be classified based on various dimensions, i.e. levels or the stars of the hotel, the intended use, the hotel's location, number of rooms, size of the hotel, the length of the guest's stay, guest activities during their stay and the type of guests who are staying. The classification of hotel rating is widely recognized; the most common system used is by assigning 1 to 5 stars on hotels (Martin-Fuentes, 2016).
Understanding the hotel features that influence hotel choice and are perceived to be important by potential guests would help the hotel management to make optimal decisions for hotel development and pricing strategy (Masiero, Heo and Pan, 2015). Moreover, the customer satisfaction of a hotel will also increase the demand for the hotel service which eventually leads to better financial performance (Sun and Kim, 2013) and higher efficiency (Assaf and Magnini, 2012). The field of hospitality management is an intertwined between production and service with strong emphasis on customer satisfaction and service quality of its offerings (Israeli, 2014). The players in the hotel industry must then consider different ways to improve service quality to enhance their competitive advantage and financial performance (Chen, 2016).
This study is a replication of Mohsin and Lengler’s (2015) research which attempts to highlights what the customers consider to be important factors of hotel performance which will influence their performance evaluation of the hotels.