Determinants of customer satisfaction: empirical study in hotels

This study has three specific objectives, formulated based on the expectation confirmation paradigm: to analyse the hotel features, the performance evaluation tools used, and the price practiced by the hotels all as determinants of customer satisfaction. Data collection began with the conduction of a survey to the financial managers of 4 and 5-star hotels, located in Portugal, in order to collect information on the performance evaluation tools used and on certain hotel features. We obtained 241 fully completed inquiries. To meet the objectives proposed, two additional types of data were also collected: the degree of customer satisfaction, for the hotels responding to the initial survey (for this we used two different online platforms); the price charged by the responding hotels, using the online platform Booking.com. The results obtained lead us to the following main contributions: the validation of the expectation confirmation paradigm, namely by demonstrating that hotel features can be considered as factors affecting customer expectations, and that the performance evaluation tools can be considered as factors affecting the actual experience; the demonstration that there is an association between the price charged by the hotels and their customers' satisfaction, but in a way contrary to the theoretical assumptions of the expectation confirmation paradigm.