The product-associated failures: international versus local hotels in Taiwan

The product-associated failures: international versus local hotels in Taiwan

Hotel companies both of the international and local type are mushrooming in Taiwan. Hence, the quality of hotel rooms is critical in order to remain cutting edge in hotel competitiveness in the market. However, service failure is unavoidable in services industry especially hotels due to long hours (24/7) of service delivery. Previous studies on hotels lacked systematic analysis of product-associated failure which is indeed critical. So, this study closes this gap. Online complaint data from June 2014 till December 2015 were collected from five international hotels and another five local hotels in Taipei. A total of 139 usable cases were extracted from online review websites. Thematic analysis was employed and resulted in three main categories (sensory quality, functional quality, and safety quality) and 11 subcategories. Sensory quality recorded the highest failure among these. The categorization offers significant academic and practical implications.