Quality In Leisure And Tourism Lecture PDF

CONCEPTS OF QUALITY IN LEISURE AND TOURISM  QUALITY MANAGEMENT THEORIES The theories and concepts of quality and its management have percolated slowly into the service industry from manufacturing. Rather than a paradigm shift taking place, the existing quality theories and tools we...

CONCEPTS OF QUALITY IN LEISURE AND TOURISM  QUALITY MANAGEMENT THEORIES The theories and concepts of quality and its management have percolated slowly into the service industry from manufacturing. Rather than a paradigm shift taking place, the existing quality theories and tools were embraced in their entirety by parts of the service sector. The paradigm shift occurred when difficulties were experienced in the service sector by taking this route (e.g. the use of only qualitative data collection methods). As the theories and concepts of the original quality gurus form part of the foundations of service quality management theory, it is important for leisure and tourism practitioners to have an understanding of them. W.E. Deming and J.M. Juran have been the two major forces in the quality management movement for the global manufacturing industry since the Second World War, especially in Japan. One of their main quality techniques, statistical process control (SPC), was developed as early as 1931 by Shewhart. Dale and Deming advocated SPC as the most appropriate method of detecting mistakes, known to quality practitioners as ‘non-conformances’. Whilst the detection of non-conformances is very relevant to the tourism and leisure industry, the lack of statistical knowledge by its employees would make the wide-scale introduction of SPC very difficult. Even so, SPC is used in some fast- food outlets to aid their error detection.  W.A. SHEWHART Shewhart’s (1931) development of the SPC technique is based on his concept of product quality: that products have qualities, rather than quality, and they can be partially measured. These qualities are classified into objective qualities, which can be measured by SPC, and subjective qualities, which cannot. Shewhart attempted to give objective values to the tangible elements (e.g. finished goods) and subjective values to the intangibles (e.g. attitude of the frontline staff). The realization that intangible elements are judged subjectively is very important to the leisure and tourism industry, which is trying to fulfil abstract and even elusive customer needs. For example, the ‘dream holiday’ can be one customer’s dream but another one’s nightmare, even when an identical experience has been offered. In the 1950s Deming, Juran and Feigenbaum introduced quality management methods to the Japanese whilst being largely ignored in the USA, their own country  W.E. DEMING Deming’s overall theory was more complex than Shewhart’s. As well as applying SPC to detect and prevent non- conformance, Deming suggested that the organization’s culture needs to adapt as well. The ‘Fourteen Points for Management’ strategy gives an indication of how to achieve this. Deming utilized Shewhart’s concept of different qualities rather than quality and argued that these can be judged by a variety of scales. Price is considered a quality on which judgement will be made and Deming suggests that an appropriate strategy is ‘to give satisfaction at a price that the user will pay’. Whilst the user is central to judging product qualities, Deming considers that ‘it is not easy to comply with as consumers’ needs are changing constantly’. This is most noticeable in the tourism and leisure industry as fashions for free-time experiences come and go.  In Deming’s ‘Fourteen Points for Management’ strategy, only the internal processes are considered. This would leave major elements of tourism or leisure service delivery operations unaffected by cultural change, such as where the customer is present or performs some of the service delivery process. Deming is an advocate of continuous improvement, a quality goal relevant to any industry. Oakland placed these concepts into Deming’s “Cycle of continuous improvement”: PLAN DO CHECK ACT. Unfortunately, Deming did not suggest how a customer focus can be achieved. This is important, as it is one of the main strategies of managing the service delivery specification. Deming (1986) gave consideration to the differences between service and manufacturing industries (Box 4.2). According to Deming they mainly consist of the frequency and processing of transactions, which is equally applicable to manufacturing, rather than reflecting major differences. It is stated that service industries have a captive market and are not competing head to head with foreign companies. This was true in the 1980s, when the globalization of services was generally a one-way flow from the USA to the rest of the world, as illustrated by Disney and McDonald’s. However, this changed in the 1990s. American service companies have to compete, even in their home market, against foreign-owned companies.  J.M. JURAN Juran had a universal concept of quality, ‘fitness for use’, which can be applied to both goods and services (Juran and Godfrey, 1999). The fitness-for-use judgement is for the users to make and includes how beneficial the goods or services are to them. Juran is therefore defining a user-based approach to quality management in which the customer is central; this is advocated by many service quality management theorists. It is also applicable to the tourism and leisure industry, as many experiences are marketed on the basis of the benefits they will give to the customer. The concept of fitness for use is expanded upon by considering the parameters and characteristics that need to be met. These interrelated parameters are quality of design, quality of conformance, abilities, and field service. This has limitations for the tourism and leisure industry, even though a customer focus is being advocated, as the design process has to be driven by knowing their needs.  Juran (1988a) considered that service industry users have a wide variety of needs, both psychological and physiological, including amusement, freedom from disagreeable chores, opportunity for learning and creativity. Juran’s description seems to fit the tourism and leisure industry better than other sections of the service industry, such as banking and other financial services. Juran separates the ‘fitness for use’ theory into two further concepts. Firstly, end users can be internal as well as external to the organization. This principle has become standard to both manufacturing and service theorists. The impact of this concept is that it gives the basis to have a customer-oriented organization, which is continually seeking improvements to all processes. This approach is valid for the tourism industry, as ‘bundles of services’ make up a package holiday. The quality of the service given to internal customers will have a great impact on that delivered to the external ones. Juran’s theory is hard for the tourism and leisure industry to put into practice as it generally requires a cultural change, the hardest adjustment to undertake. Secondly, quality is managed by three interrelated processes: quality planning, quality control and quality improvement. This is what is known as Juran’s Trilogy JURAN TRILOGY DIAGRAM: THE THREE UNIVERSAL PROCESSES OF MANAGING FOR QUALITY  A.V. FEIGENBAUM Feigenbaum’s (1991) theory built upon the previous quality writers and requires the application of quality systems to manage the whole of the organization. Quality management is seen as a framework for all aspects of the business, including its culture, and is known as ‘total quality management’ (TQM). As tourism and leisure organizations were some of the last in the service sector to embrace quality management concepts, most are only just moving from implementing quality control and assurance tools and techniques (e.g. quality circles, quality manuals, error detection) to the more sophisticated holistic quality systems. If tourism and leisure organizations are to be successful in this transition, it is therefore important for them to be aware of the philosophies, such as Feigenbaum’s, that underpin these holistic quality frameworks. Feigenbaum agreed that customers determine quality by judging whether or not the goods or services purchased meet their requirements. This ‘total customer satisfaction oriented’ approach is the foundation of this theory but, unlike Deming’s concepts, the differences between goods and services are not considered  Feigenbaum was one of the first writers on quality to distinguish between tangibles (the decor, uniforms of staff, etc.) and intangibles of service, stating that the service sector is ‘heavily dependent upon human skills, attitudes and training’. This acknowledgement of the importance of the interaction between customers and staff is fundamental to managing quality in tourism and leisure services. From Feigenbaum’s TQM approach, it would be expected that issues of employees, quality costs, the use of SPC and development of organization-wide systems are addressed. These are found in ‘Ten Benchmarks of Total Quality Control for the 1990s’. Unexpectedly, in point 10 the monitoring of customer needs is left with third parties such as dealerships or corporate buyers.  T. PETERS Peters (1987) adopted a slightly different perspective. Even though he had criticized Crosby on his lack of customer orientation, some of the observations that Peters and Waterman (1982) noticed when researching excellent US companies are directly related to Crosby’s work – for example, trying to achieve limited defects and reduce the cost of rework. Peters (1987) defined quality as ‘the customer’s perception of excellence’. From this abstract view of quality, Peters listed the excellent quality attributes as being: virtuous, practical, aesthetic, perceptual, subjective and above expectations. The not-for-profit sectors of the tourism and leisure industry would see giving a level of service above expectations as being costly and wasteful of community resources. Peters is the only one of these early quality writers who defines quality in terms of excellence. Of the service quality writers, Becker (1996) considered this to be a traditional, philosophical view of quality but Zeithaml et al. (1990) agreed with this notion. In fact some of the most sophisticated service quality management systems, especially those that are based on the Business Excellence Model, follow the Peters definition and therefore measure and monitor ‘excellence’ in all aspects of an organization.