est to hospitality researchers. It is generally agreed that hotels should provide
Ye et al. / INFLUENCE OF HOTEL PRICE ON PERCEIVED SERVICE QUALITY 25
good and continuous customer value. In addition, hoteliers need to place more
emphasis on improving the quality of their services to meet the needs and
expectations of their customers (Haywood, 1983).
Service quality means the ability to meet customers’ stated and implied require-
ments (Lin & Su, 2003). In the hospitality context, perceived service quality is a
measure of how well the service delivered by hotels matches customer expectations.
The vast majority of the literature focuses on providing different methods by which
to evaluate hotels’ service quality; these can be used to measure both expected and
perceived quality (Briggs, Sutherland, & Drummond, 2007; Erto & Vanacore, 2002;
Hsieh, Lin, & Lin, 2008). In the hospitality industry, the point of looking at customer
satisfaction is to identify the key attributes influencing their needs and expectations
(Yang, Cheng, & Sung, 2011). Some studies have measured the factors affecting cus-
tomers’ choice of hotels. Finding room cleanliness, convenience of location, value for
money, and friendliness of staff are all regarded as important factors in the process of
assessing service quality (Callan & Kyndt, 2001; Lockyer, 2003; Choi & Chu, 2001).
Furthermore, hotels with different star ratings have different quality standards, so that
customers may experience different levels of performance depending on hotel classifica-
tion (Liu & Liu, 1993; Pine & Phillips, 2005).
The concept of value has been studied in various fields, particularly in hos-
pitality and tourism research (Sanchez, Callarisa, Rodriguez, & Moliner, 2005).
Zeithaml (1988) identifies four distinct meanings for value: (a) low price, (b) whatever
one wants in a product, (c) the quality the consumer receives for the price paid,
and (d) what the consumer gets for what she or he gives. In the service industry,
specifically, the value perceived by customers could be investigated via the
service quality they receive and the price they pay. Slater and Narver (2000)
define customer value as a trade-off between the benefit of consuming products/
services and the disadvantage (or sacrifice) involved. In the narrow perspective,
benefit is identified as quality, and sacrifice is represented as price (Slater &
Narver, 2000). However, Bolton and Drew (1991) argue that defining value as
a function of quality is not enough. In the hospitality sector, some studies adopt
particular components to describe customer value, such as quality, price, and emo-
tional and social value (Sweeney & Soutar, 2001); behavioral price, monetary
price, emotional response, quality, and reputation (Petrick, 2002); and reputa-
tion for quality, value for money, and prestige (Slater & Narver, 2000).
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