Leisure sport services quality

Abstract

As a result of growing competition and increased customer expectations, the quality of leisure sport service has been identified as one of the most important topics in the field of service management. Providing high quality service is not only the most important factor for customer satisfaction and loyalty (e.g. Berry et al., 1994), but it could determine the competitiveness of a service provider (Lengnick and Hall, 1996). Service quality in general has attracted significant research attention in recent years, but that is not true in case of the leisure sport industry. The measurement of service quality in this field is still in a formative stage. My purpose in this paper is to present a complete literature review on the quality of services related to leisure sports. I also intend to give answers to the following research questions: What are the main distinguishing characteristics of a leisure sport service provider, not only with respect to service quality but also in general. What are the important dimensions of service quality for the leisure sport services? I am also interested in the "Hungarian aspects" of leisure sport services. I present herein the results of my quantitative research among customers (university students) and the main results of in-depth interviews with owners or managers of Hungarian leisure sport service providers.