Strategic Marketing

CASE 11 - SUMMARY

The Crestwood Inn is owned by a group of independent investors, and is one of the oldest properties in the area. It has a total of 116 rooms with basic amenities, and does not have a restaurant or pool. There have been periodic renovations at the Inn over the years, and the cost of the rooms is at an average of $100, which is on the low end of the market price, and an occupancy rate of 70% because of its location, at a convenient distance to the local horse racing venues. Unlike in large chain hotels, with the Inn being an independent hotel, the technology usage has not been upgraded and the customer information was gathered through surveys and comment cards. The reservation system used at the Inn was very simple, with no new additional information on the past rates and occupancy of the rooms. In order to gather more information, the new general manager created a comment card to be placed in every room, which would help her gather more information about the customer satisfaction.

Question 1:

Comment cards are one of the methods used to

CASE 12 - SUMMARY

The customers of the Remington Hotel were a mix of 60% of individual temporary guests and 40% of group business, and of the group business, 1/3rd consisted of motor coach tour groups. The sight that greeted Madeline Lewis on her first day at the Remington Hotel was a long queue of about a 100 people waiting to check-in to the hotel, with only two employees at the front desk trying to complete the process of checking in. Lewis received more information about the quality of the service from a customer point of view, directly from one of the customers living at the hotel, who faced the following concerns:

* The customer was unable to check into the hotel at the airport as advertised by the hotel

* A long wait to check-in to the hotel when one of the front desk clerks closed her shift at 11pm even when there were about 10 customers waiting to be checked in

* The customer received no help from the hotel in carrying their bags to their room, which was two buildings away, and the customer ended up carrying both their bags and their sleeping child

* The customer was double checked into a room which was already occupied and had to wait for another 10 minutes to be given another room and wait some more for the keys

Lewis had data collected by the hotel from its customers, who were asked to rate the hotel on a scale of 1-7 on the five service dimensions such as tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, empathy, and assurance.

Question 1:

Based on Madeline's Day 1 observations and conversation with Mr. Spencer, the following examples show the service quality gaps at the Remington Hotel:

Communication Gap - this gap occurs when a company promises to deliver a certain service through external communication, such as advertisements, and fails to fulfill its promise. In this case, the hotel had advertised an airport check-in for the customers, mostly for the customers who have arrived late at night or their flights had been delays. However, when Mr. Spencer went to check-in at 10pm, he was informed that the service was not available at that time during the day, which was the purpose of the service.

Delivery Gap - this gap is formed based on the employees' willingness to perform the service. In this case, the delivery gap appeared when Mr. Spencer was waiting in line to check-in along with another 10 customers, and one of the front desk clerks closed her shift promptly at 11pm, leaving the customers to be served by the remaining one clerk. Even when there was a need for the clerk to finish the