Delivering value for customers has become a central theme in business. The paper examines customer value from two perspectives, i.e. that of service provider and that of the customer. A total 231 managers and 385 customers responded to the survey. The results indicate that managers’ perception of customer value is different to what customers’ experience as customer value. The differences persist across different classes of hotels. These results suggest there is a need to align management and customer perspectives to optimize customer value as delivered and experienced. Specifically, hotels should invest in customer understanding and customer linking activities.
The study of customer value has become one of increasing interest to researchers and managers (Slater and Narver, 2000), and is regarded as the next source of competitive advantage (Woodruff, 1997). Customer value and service quality have also been of great interest to hospitality researchers (Ekinci et al., 2003; Oh, 1999; Kim and Oh, 2004). The main responsibility of hoteliers is the delivery of quality service to customers (Su, 2004). Choi and Chu (2001) suggest that to be successful in the industry, hoteliers must provide superior customer value and this must be done continuously and efficiently. In addition, hoteliers need to put more emphasize in improving the quality of their services offerings and in ensuring that the needs and expectations of their guests are being met (Haywood, 1983). This especially true because the hotel sector is highly competitive and is central to the success of the tourism industry.
Service provision can be viewed from two different perspectives: that of the service provider or that of the customers and the perspectives would be expected to differ. That is, gaps might arise between expectation and actual performance, and differences between perception of the service by the service provider and service receiver (Saleh and Ryan, 1991). Specifically, in the hotel industry, there are some problems involved in the evaluation of service provision. Some customers may perceive a service as being comparatively unimportant while for others it is critical. Management has to optimize under such conditions and may place significant importance upon the tangible components of the hotels such as good décor, etc. (Hartline et al., 2003) to cover for the diversity of their clients. Previous studies have examined customer value from the customer's perspective (Sanchez et al., 2005) or the provider's perspective (Eggert and Ulaga, 2002; Liu et al., 2005) but rarely has research sought to achieve both perspectives in a single study, in particular in the hospitality and tourism sectors. There are several studies in this area that had been published in the hospitality and tourism context mainly related to service quality topics (see Baker and Crompton, 2000; Bigne et al., 2005; Ekinci and Riley, 2001; Weiermair and Fuchs, 1999). This research seeks to achieve this, i.e. customer value as seen by the provider and also as seen by the customer. In other words, the paper seeks to investigate different perceptions of customer value between managers and customers in hotel establishments.
This study has a number of limitations. First, the respondents from budget hotels were relatively small for manager sample, and the results need to be interpreted with some cautions. There was low response rate from this category relative to the other hotels despite special effort being made to the increase response rate. There may be a need for additional strategies to motivate managers at the low hotel classification end to participate. Second, the number of non-Indonesians both as managers and customers was under represented and did not justify further analysis hence the study should be interpreted as presenting an Indonesian perspective as opposed to tourists to Indonesia. Third, while an attempt was made to match customers to hotel classification, the results would have benefited if customers had come from the same hotels as the managers. Attempts were made to match respondents to hotel classification but this should be considered a limitation in interpreting the findings.
