Building Service Excellence for Customer Satisfaction

Abstract

The 2012 Cornell Hospitality Research Summit offered a substantial menu of presentations on service excellence and revenue management. Several presenters emphasized the value of satisfied customers in the form of higher occupancy that supports firmer room rates. The presentations focused heavily on strategies for building customer satisfaction and for developing integrated, data-driven revenue management approaches. Most critically, presenters suggested that the hotel industry should integrate technology into customer satisfaction strategies, since technology provides the information that is critical to service excellence. Integrating revenue management more tightly with the hotel’s management strategies will help improve room rates and distribution. In its own right, distribution has become a critical aspect of hotel management.