Performance Evaluation Report for Griffith University Hotel

I. Introduction

Griffith University Hotel is a four and a half star teaching hotel owned by Griffith University. In order to meet customers' needs and find ways to achieve better performance and services to customers, the Griffith University Hotel wished to evaluate the existing facilities at the City Hotel. As a manager who has professional skills in the area of event and facilities, I will analyze the importance and performance means of 17 different facilities between business travelers and pleasure travelers.

Researchers have collected the importance and performance data for each facility. I calculated importance-performance means and gained the five most important and least important facilities, as well as the five highest and lowest performance facilities. Moreover, I draw up a scatter plot and set benchmark standards that indicate acceptable levels of importance and performance. Then I divide the scatter plot into four areas to distinguish the high and low importance segments and the high and low performance segments. The areas attempt to identified are: performance well, possibly being over-resourced, need attention and no real issue to focus attention on. I also conduct T-test between the two types of travelers and each of the facilities to identify if there are any significant differences.

This research is focusing on three main questions:

1. In Griffith University Hotel, which five facilities are most important and least important as well as highest performance and lowest performance?

2. Which areas are performing well, possibly being over-resourced, need attention and no real issue to focus attention on?

3. If there are any significant differences between both business and pleasure travelers on any of the facilities?

II. Methods

To analyze the data properly, the method of Importance-Performance Analysis was used. The Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) framework was introduced by Martilla and James (1977) in marketing research in order to assist in understanding customer satisfaction as a function of both expectations concerning the significant attributes and judgments about their performance. Therefore, the importance and performance data can be plotted on a two dimensional grid with importance on the y-axis and performance on the x-axis. The data are then mapped into four quadrants (Bacon, 2003; Martilla & James, 1977), thus the four quadrants matrix helps organizations to identify the areas for improvement and actions for minimizing the gap between importance and performance. In hospitality and tourism industry, IPA is the most significant and direct methods for their management department to analyze the problems of themselves by way for improve customer satisfaction, reduce performance gap as well as retarget the customer service standards.

During the data analysis process, the researcher collected data from 265 different travelers then using Microsoft Excel to get importance and performance means and standard deviations for each facility firstly. And then, a scatter plot was created to summarize a set of bivariate data of two variables which gives a good visual picture of the relationship between two variables, showing how much one variable is affected by another. At last, the T-test is used to test for significant difference between the mean of two samples. (Veal, 2006) T-test produces P-value as the evidence of whether means of samples have significant difference or not. If 'p' is less than 0.05 means that there is a significant difference between the means with a confidence level of 95% for researchers.

III. Results

1. Means and SD Table

Table on above shows the results of mean and standard deviation numbers from the survey. According the mean scores which present the average scores, I find out the answer for the first research question. The five most important facilities which include: in-room cable television (3.875), express check-out (3.057), a-la-carte restaurant (3.094), free daily newspaper (3.030), swimming pool (2.932). Oppositely, the five least important facilities for customers are: wireless broadband connection throughout hotel (2.366), mini-bar (2.238), tennis courts (1.913), express check-in (2.675) and valet parking (2.634). Meanwhile, the following facilities are the best performing: family restaurant (3.551), swimming pool (3.294), tennis courts (3.358), in-room pay movies (3.328) and express check-out (3.389). However, in-room broadband connection (2.843), mini-bar (2.729), in-room cable television (2.828), valet parking (2.948) and tour booking service (2.593) seem to be the lowest performance facilities within customers' vision.

2. Scatter Plot with quadrants marked

The scatter plot on above shows the position of facilities at the hotel depend on their importance and performance. It was divided into four parts which present different performance of hotel and expectations of customers. The first part (Imp<2.79 Perf>3.12) is presenting high performance by hotel but low expectation of customers.

Such as tennis courts (Imp=1.913 Perf=3.358) family restaurant (Imp=2.74 Perf=3.55), room service