Exploring Two Main Perspectives towards Customer Satisfaction in hotel industry: Managers and Customers

PurposeOne of the most substantial factors for Tourism Industry is Hotel Industry while it could provide the necessary substructures for Tourism. Growth in Hotel industry will lead to the growth in Tourism industry. Considering a major growth in Hotel industry in recent years in Iran, in this research, numerous objectives had been pursued. The first purpose of this study is to explore four different factors of salary, age, gender, and marital status between customers. The second goal is to study customer satisfaction from two main perspectives of customers and hotel managers and explaining whether there is a significant difference in customers and hotel managers perceptions of customer satisfaction or not and what role customer satisfaction factors such as perceived quality, perceived value, image and customer’s expectations have in making these differences. Finally, the third objective is to find out whether there is a significant difference between male satisfaction and female satisfaction or not. Design/Methodology/approachDescriptive survey design is utilized in this study. The researcher selected the quantitative research methodology to pursue her research. Questionnaire has been chosen as the best tool for collecting primary data from hotelmanagers and customers in Iran. In this study the researcher has used two different kinds of questionnaires for customers and hotel managers.Descriptive data was organized. The researcher organized all the respondents' background data such as gender, age, personal income then the percentage method; mean and. standard deviation are used to analyze the distribution of data.The researcher applied independent T-test to find out the differences between effective factors (perceived quality, perceived value, image, customer expectations) of customer satisfaction from two points of view. This method is also used to explore the differences between male female satisfactions. FindingsThe main consumers of hotels are married, young and males. The majority of people in this study have high monthly income. There are no significant differences between customer satisfaction of males and females. The results indicated that there was a significant difference between two perspectives (hotel managers and customers) in all effective factors of customer satisfaction and its consequences. According to the other objective the researcher found out International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences September 2013, Vol. 3, No. 9 ISSN: 2222-6990 246 www.hrmars.com/journals that there is no significant difference in customer satisfaction between males and females. Originality/ValueThe results of this study are apotential contribution to both hotel management and tourism industry improvement in Iran. Hospitality and tourism Industry has become one of the substantial industries in global industries and it could change the customers' life style. This study can encourage Hotel owners and Hotel managers to recognize the effective factors on customer satisfaction by considering different perceptions and try to meet them in order to enhance customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.