Alternative method of quality evaluation in tourism. Case study applied in tourist accommodation units

In tourism, quality has two components: a) the quality of the service process; b) the quality level of the service itself, which is the real service offered and perceived by the customer. Quality could be evaluated by the consumer according to a number of factors, called reference factors. Therefore, the price or the classification category of the tourist accommodation unit, signalling, parking, diversity of propositions, service diversity, direct relationships (employer - customer) or indirect relationships (customer - customer), etc. are only a few of the reference factors analysed. Consequently, we consider that in the field of tourist accommodation units, the concept of quality involves the totality of the problems concerning the quality of tourist services, which is an extremely extended area where the tour operators' (hotel managers') points of view meet those of the consumers. In an extremely competitive hotel environment, hotel managers should find modalities to make their products and services better than the ones of the competition. Therefore, the specialists in this field, Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry, Gronroos, Cronin and Taylor and others propose the use of efficient instruments to measure and to evaluate the quality (SERVQUAL, SERVPERF, etc.). In this work, after a rigorous selection and a critical analysis of the concepts, we proposed to establish an alternative method of quality evaluation in tourism, by the calculation of the global indicator of quality evaluation in tourism (GIQET), case study applied in tourist accommodation units. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.