https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0103-562X
ABSTRACT
Service quality and customer satisfaction (SQCS) have been one of the most-discussed themes in the last two decades in tourism and hospitality research. Several new dimensions have been added by the later researchers and the area have been expended to allied and peripheral areas of tourism and hospitality. The present study is an attempt to analyses emerging themes and trends scientifically in SQCS research in tourism and hospitality and explore future research directions. The study employs bibliometric analysis of literature using bibliometrix R package. The database for the current study has been prepared from Web of Science. The results reveal a steady growth in SQCS research during the study period, especially in the hospitality sector and that “customer satisfaction” and “satisfaction” as the two major themes of SQCS research. Thematic network analysis of the SQCS publications revealed destination loyalty, customer value, customer experience, and emotional labor as important themes covered in SQCS research in tourism and hospitality.
Introduction
The credibility and acceptability of an academic discipline depend upon the body of knowledge developed by rigorous scientific research (Crawford-Welch & McCleary, Citation1992), and tourism and hospitality is no exception. Research journals are a vital source of communication on the development of knowledge. According to Weiner (Citation2001), academic journals produce, disseminate, and exchange academic knowledge. A review of previous academic research helps to understand the existing knowledge in a particular area (Hart, Citation2018). It creates a firm foundation for knowledge and the development of the theory (Webster & Watson, Citation2002). Scientific and empirical reviews of tourism journals helps to trace the evolution of its subject matter and emerging trends (Ma & Law, Citation2009)
Service quality and customer satisfaction (SQCS) emerged as one of the major topics in tourism and hospitality research that has received a great deal of attention from scholars and researchers. There have been considerable number of publications on SQCS since the initial models of service quality published in the mid-1980s (Grönroos, Citation1984; Oliver, Citation1981; Parasuraman et al., Citation1985) and it continues to be a major topic of inquiry. Investigation of customer expectations and perceptions dominated research related to service quality and customer satisfaction (SQCS) in the tourism and hospitality industry (Lam & Zhang, Citation1999). Customer satisfaction plays a vital role in the profitability of a business as it leads to repeat business and customer loyalty in the long run (Anderson et al., Citation1994). Quality and customer satisfaction thus remain a significant source of competitive advantage for tourism and hospitality businesses. An extensive review of the literature suggests a lack of bibliometric studies that examine and scientifically map the body of knowledge related to service quality and customer satisfaction. This research aims to examine the trends in service quality and customer satisfaction research, identify the gaps, and propose future research agenda. The data for bibliometric analysis have been extracted from the Web of Science database. The results establish the direction of research and developments in SQCS research in the academic discipline of hospitality and tourism in the last two decades. This paper is organized as follows. The next section presents literature review on service quality and customer satisfaction. It is followed by methods and materials, and a discussion of the findings. Conclusion, implications, limitations and future research options close this paper.
Literature review
A literature review helps researchers to understand the historical development of knowledge in an area of study (Creswell, Citation2012) and support further research by critically summarizing the knowledge already produced and identifying knowledge gaps (Hart, Citation2018). Research communities commonly use narrative review, systematic analysis, and meta-analysis (Pickering & Byrne, Citation2014). A systematic review of literature is commonly employed by the research community (Bryman, Citation2012) as thisJou approach provides opportunities for interventions for experts and practitioners and make the best use of the available knowledge (Tranfield et al., Citation2003). Scientific search methods, proper analysis, and synthesis differentiate systematic reviews from a narrative review (Uman, Citation2011). Systematic reviews map the vast body of available intellectual information and enable researchers to identify the latest trends, unexplored areas, and so on (Petticrew & Roberts, Citation2006).
Tourism industry is highly fragmented with a number of sectors and sub-sectors serving the needs of visitors. The visitors interact with a number of service providers and the interaction process and service delivery reflects the key attributes such as value, quality and satisfaction in the tourism consumption process. Service quality refers to the assessment by the user of a particular service to see whether it fulfills the expectation at the desired level (Taylan Dortyol et al., Citation2014). Perceived service quality referes to the customer’s assessment of the overall excellence of the service (Zeithaml, Citation1988). After the introduction of service quality models (Grönroos, Citation1984; Parasuraman et al., Citation1985), many studies were conducted on its implications to businesses, including tourism and hospitality. According to Baker and Crompton (Citation2000), higher quality leads to higher satisfaction levels, resulting in customer loyalty. In the technology-driven business environment of tourism and hospitality, the dimensions of the consumption experience and customer satisfaction frameworks need more attention (Wu et al., Citation2014). As part of the service industry, the consumption process in tourism and hospitality has become more experiential than transactional (Cetin et al., Citation2014). Research in experiential marketing, experiential risk, experiential value, and satisfaction has witnessed a significant increase post-2000 (M.S. Kim & Stepchenkova, Citation2018; Wu et al., Citation2019, Citation2018; Wu & Liang, Citation2009).
There exists an extensive range of academic literature on SQCS that covers various aspects of service quality (Bellou & Andronikidis, Citation2009; Chen Lung et al., Citation2012; Fotiadis & Vassiliadis, Citation2016; Ju et al., Citation2019; Martínez Caro & Martínez García, Citation2008; Shonk & Chelladurai, Citation2008). Researchers in tourism and hospitality construed that service quality leads to customer satisfaction along with a number of other related factors. Quality of experience in tourism and hospitality is linked to perceived value, satisfaction, and behavioral intentions. Service quality is a significant factor of behavioral intentions (Chen & Chen, Citation2010). Demographic features influence perceptions of customers and their decisions to choose particular services (Cao & Kim, Citation2015; Rahman et al., Citation2017). Authenticity perception affects behavioral intentions of customers (Chen et al., Citation2020). As L. Su et al. (Citation2015) suggeste, service fairness and service quality constitute subjective well-being of the customer, which influence behavioral intentions. Service quality is closely linked to customer loyalty. Hemsley-Brown and Alnawas (Citation2016) noted a causal relationship between service quality and emotional brand attachment that leads to customer loyalty. Customer satisfaction of service quality has a mediating role between customer experience and customer loyalty (Hsieh et al., Citation2015; Lemy et al., Citation2019; Priporas et al., Citation2017). Innovation was found to be a major latent construct of customer satisfaction (Truong et al., Citation2020). Relationship between destination attributes, quality of perceived service experience and loyalty result in destination preference (Oriade & Schofield, Citation2019; Owusu-Frimpong et al., Citation2013; Schlesinger et al., Citation2020).
Recent research on service quality and customer satisfaction have linked them to service quality perception of stakeholders (Dedeoğlu & Demirer, Citation2015; Lim & Lee, Citation2020), customer perception (Brida et al., Citation2016; Wall & Berry, Citation2007), service loyalty (Ahrholdt et al., Citation2016), emotional labor (Grobelna, Citation2020; Moreo et al., Citation2019) and E-service quality Information technology tools such as machine learning and big data analysis are now increasingly being used to measure service quality attributes (C. Kim & Chung, Citation2020; Kwon et al., Citation2020; Lee et al., Citation2020; Prentice et al., Citation2020; Ying et al., Citation2020).
The range of Web of Science (WoS) indexed journals in Tourism and Hospitality shows an incremental growth of articles on SQCS in the tourism and hospitality industry from the year 2010 onwards. Attempts to measure service quality employing various scales emerged in this period, embrace new dimensions of the dynamic tourism and hospitality industry. New approaches measuring service quality appeared in the recent literature, such as the E-travel service quality scale (Ho & Lee, Citation2007), casino service quality scale (Wong & Fong, Citation2012), service quality scale for midscale hotels (Ahmad Syed et al., Citation2019), and Green Lodging Service Quality Scale-GLSERV (Lee & Cheng, Citation2018). Prayag et al. Citation2019 conducted a systematic review of literature on customer satisfaction and analysed the future research agenda.
To sum up, the past few decades have seen an increase in research on service quality and customer satisfaction within the tourism and hospitality sector that focused on the role of cognitive and psychological factors in tourist satisfaction, tourism supply chain, destination attributes, service quality of hospitality units, visitor experience, stakeholder view and employee experience and so on.
As mentioned earlier, the main purpose of this study is to analyze emerging themes and future directions in Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction (SQCS) research in tourism and hospitality, employing the bibliometric analysis of journal publications that appeared from 1998 to 2020. The bibliometric analysis helps investigate a body of literature of a given subject area to determine the structure of its knowledge and research themes by quantification and comparison (Okubo, Citation1997; Zhang et al., Citation2020). The study involves performance analysis, science mapping and examining thematic evolution of subtopics, citation preferences, co-citation patterns, impactful sources, and growth trends in SQCS in tourism and hospitality research.
Materials and Methods
Data Source
Bibliometric tools have been found quite useful in understanding academic research’s scope and depth in a discipline. This process involves a systematic approach to assess the research publications in a selected database over a period of time and evaluate their impact on the body of knowledge. It enables researchers to understand the subject’s scope, development of research in its core and peripheral areas, research collaborations, identifying the underlying patterns, and emerging trends (Rai & Singh, Citation2020). Bibliometrics demarcates the body of research, measures the units of publication, citations, and the research output (Broadus, Citation1987). It has been used in various academic disciplines to quantitatively analyze and describe literature (Zhang et al., Citation2020). For this present study, the Web of Science (WoS) database available at (http://apps.webofknowledge.com) was chosen. The reasons for choosing this database because it provides access to the world’s leading citation databases, that include Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AandHCI) with perpetual access. WoS is a leading database of scholarly work (Rodriguez-Lopez et al., Citation2020), acknowledged by the research community for its reliability (Muhammad et al., Citation2020) and the scope and quality of studies, which is an essential criterion in the systematic review process (Moher et al., Citation2010).
Search strategy
The authors have applied a WoS advance search on the keyword WC = (Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism) was chosen to find relevant results. In this search, a total of 63,516 records were found on 22 January 2021. Again, the search was narrowed down based on the keyword “Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction,” a total of 6456 records were found. After refining the search in the subject category Tourism and Hospitality from 1998 to 2020, 1054 records were found on the topic. In the third phase, conference abstracts, rejoinders, book reviews were excluded, and 990 articles were found useful. This ensures the study confines to in-depth scholarly research taken up in the area, which was peer-reviewed. At the fourth stage, a language filter was applied to shortlist articles published in the English language. A total of 989 records were found useful at this phase.
Data analysis
At the final stage, each article was reviewed with the title and abstracts to ensure data accuracy (X. W. Su et al., Citation2019), and 740 records were found suitable for the present study after excluding the conference proceedings and articles not related to the chosen topic. The selected records were imported to the bibliometrix R Package to extract data and perform analysis. The analysis examined the data set, sources, authors, documents, conceptual structure, intellectual structure, and social structure of the study area. The results of the analysis are presented based on performance analysis and science mapping in the following sequence. Research publication growth pattern, most relevant sources, highly cited authors, cited reference analysis, keywords analysis, thematic evolution, co-occurrence network, and co-citation network. These indices are mostly used and considered as scientific tools to measure academic research output.
The bibliometric methods are used for performance analysis and science mapping (Cobo et al., Citation2011). Performance analysis evaluates the publications, authors, and institutions (Zupic & Čater, Citation2015). Through science mapping, representations of intellectual connections can be assessed and represented (Small, Citation1973). It is performed at a specific point to capture the field’s static picture (Zupic & Čater, Citation2015). shows step-by-step of the research process.
Figure 1. Detailed workflow of the research process (modified from Rai & Singh, Citation2020).
Results
The following table indicates the main information of the dataset that is under study. 740 articles sourced from WoS database on SQCS has been analyzed for the period 1998–2020. 54 research articles were authored by single authors and the remaining articles were coauthored. The calculated collaboration index is 1.97.
Year-wise growth pattern of research publications
The chronological progression of articles on SQCS is presented in . The findings indicate the increasing popularity and importance of service quality and customer satisfaction as a major research theme in tourism and hospitality. There has been a steady growth in publications from 2006 to 2019 barring exception of year 2014 and 2020. Year 2020 witnessed the spread of Covid-19 pandemic worldwide, which resulted in a paradigm shift in research orientation in the academic community as well. A probable reason of decrease in the number of articles published in 2020 could be researchers focused more on the impact of Covid-19 on the tourism and hospitality sector. Most of the journals dedicated issues on the pandemic and management of health crisis. This could be one possible reason for the decrease in the number of publications in the year 2020.
Figure 2. Documents published on SQCS in HLST per year.
Share of publications by continents
The chart below () presents the percentage of SQCS publication by continents. Researchers in the Asian continent appear to be more prolific in publishing research on SQCS in tourism and hospitality. They account for 44.33% of publications during the study period, followed by North American and European researchers with 28.13% and 18.87%, respectively.
Figure 3. Share of publications by continents.
Relevance rank of sources
Bradford’s Law (Alabi, Citation1979, p. 151) postulates that “if the journals containing articles on a given subject are arranged in descending order of the number of articles they carried on the subject, then the successive zones of periodicals containing the same number of articles on the subject form the simple geometric series 1:n:n2:n3” was applied. Source clustering analyses the contribution of publications as sources of knowledge in promoting SQCS research in tourism and hospitality. As per Bradford’s law, the International Journal of Hospitality Management and International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management are in the core zone accounts for 35.68% (264 articles) of dedicated publications in the study area. These two journals constitute one third of the entire publications. The middle zone consists of six journals with 33.51% (248 articles) and 25 journals are found in a minor zone which constitutes 30.81% (228 articles). illustrates the relevance of sources as per Bradford’s Law.
Table 1. Relevance (Rank) of Sources by clustering through Bradford’s Law.
Most impactful sources
The findings in list the ten most impactful journals that published articles on SQCS in tourism and hospitality. The International Journal of Hospitality Management (IJHM), Tourism Management (TM), and International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management (IJCHM) published more impactful research articles (in terms of citations, h index, and g index) on SQCS in tourism and hospitality during 1998–2020.
Table 2. Top sources by impact indicators.
lists the publications on SQCS that had the highest number of citations from the WoS dataset.
Table 3. Top publications within the data set.
Longitudinal citation analysis
A spectrogram analysis was carried out to identify the historical trend in citations of publications related to SQCS in tourism and hospitality by examining incidences of references within the literature (Marx et al., Citation2014). The spectrogram of the SQCS in tourism and hospitality is shown in the black line, and the five-year median deviation is shown in the red line ().
Figure 4. Research publication year spectroscopy.
The peaks in the diagramme at year 2000 and year 2010 significant turning points in SQCS research. Analysis of trending topics shows that researches on service quality post-2015 discuss innovative themes such as physical environment, relationship quality, customer engagement, sharing economy, reviews and so on.
Trending topics
Analysis of keywords plus shows the trending topics in SQCS research during the last five years. The results indicate that a number of new themes emerged in the recent period such as the influence of new age customers, determinants of loyalty and placed customer experience as an important area of research. Many studies have been taken up in the recent years focusing on the SQSC in the hospitality sector.Many of them also studied the moderating role of the experiential attributes leads to satisfaction, behavioral intention. Customer review of their experience in social media was found to be another trending area in SQCS research.
Co-occurrence network
Author’s keywords represent the essential terms identified by the author, which are tagged with the main document for retrieval of the publication. “Keyword plus” captures an article’s content with depth and variety (Garfield & Sher, Citation1993). Keyword plus are important words or phrases extracted from the documents using a computer algorithm (Aria & Cuccurullo, Citation2017).
The concept of co-occurrence is originally rooted in bibliographic coupling (Morris & Van der Veer Martens, Citation2008). The network diagram () displays the proximity between different keywords and the center of the research field (Aria & Cuccurullo, Citation2017). Four major clusters have been identified ().
Table 4. Cluster of keyword plus based on co-occurrence network.
Figure 5. Thematic evolution (keyword plus) up to 2016 and after 2016.
Thematic evolution
The longitudinal thematic analysis (Aria & Cuccurullo, Citation2017) was conducted to understand the changes in the research area. The database is divided into two time slices (based on the total number of publications, up to 2016 and after 2016) to identify the changes in research themes. shows the changes in key themes of keyword plus, and demonstrates evolution of themes based of author keywords.
Figure 6. Thematic evolution (author’s keywords) up to 2016 and after 2016.
The thematic evolution of keyword plus indicate that four major themes till 2016, which transformed to a set of new themes post 2016. “Customer satisfaction” was one of the prolific themes till 2016, and it continued to be major topic of research post 2016. At the same time, researches on new themes information, trust and analysis were diverged from customer satisfaction post 2016. The remaining keyword plus themes “model,” “satisfaction,” and “performance” merged into “customer satisfaction,” “information,” “antecedents,” “quality,” and “trust.”
This diagramme demonstrates the transformation of author’s keywords before and after 2016. The thematic evolution indicate that different research themes taken up before 2016, such as “airlines,” “customer experience,” “trust,” “satisfaction,” “behavioural intention,” “hospitality,” “revisit intention” and “service failure.” Post 2016, authors keywords centered on the themes suchas “satisfaction,” “service quality,” “customer experience,” “physical environment,” “relationship quality,” “emotion,” “behavioural intention,” and “tourist satisfaction.”
Co-citation network
The frequency with which two documents are mentioned together is measured by co-citation (Small, Citation1973). In co-citation analysis, as well as counts of the number of times documents, authors’ oeuvres, and journal titles have been cited together (McCain, Citation1991). shows the co-citation network of authors.
Figure 7. Co-citation network.
Morris and Van der Veer Martens (Citation2008) claim that co-citation analysis groups references by common sources. It identifies clusters of commonly used combination of topics. Co-citation, according to (Braam et al., Citation1991), examines high-density areas in a citation network by clustering highly cited publications. The cluster of publications depicts the formation of a particular research work that has been acknowledged by the academic community, as well as how it is carried on by researchers with similar interests, who use the same references and develop research subjects in the same area. Three clusters have been identified as notable in this network, with each cluster’s key contributors to the knowledge domain (). In this network, three clusters have been found significant, and the main contributors of knowledge domain in the given cluster.
Table 5. Co-citation analysis – clusters and themes.
The first cluster represents the development of empirical models measuring service quality attributes. Four major pieces of research found in this area are evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error (Fornell and Larcker, Citation1981), structural equation modeling in practice: a review and recommended two-step approach (Anderson and Gerbing, Citation1988), Whence Consumer Loyalty? Oliver, R L (Citation1999), satisfaction, and behavioral perspective on the customer (Oliver, Citation1997). Statistical models proposed by these researchers to conduct empirical research on customer satisfaction constituted the first cluster in the present study.
In the second cluster, the dominating theme is customer satisfaction. This cluster highlights the prominent researchers who paved the way for developing customer satisfaction as a major research segment. Some of the most influential researches in this area was behavioral consequences of service quality (Zeithaml et al., Citation1996) and a cognitive model of the antecedents and consequences of satisfaction decisions (Oliver, Citation1980). Other important research publications that influenced researchers were SERVQUAL: A multiple-item scale for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality (Parasuraman et al., Citation1988). A conceptual model of service quality and its implications for future research (Parasuraman et al., Citation1985), Assessing the effects of quality value, and customer satisfaction on consumer behavioral intentions in service environments (Cronin et al., Citation2000), and Measuring service quality: a reexamination and extension (Cronin, J., and Taylor, S., Citation1992). These publications paved the way for developing SQCS as a major research area in social science.
The third cluster highlights some prolific researches in the area of consumer perceptions of price, quality, and value (Zeithaml, Citation1988), the impact of physical surroundings customers and employees authored by Bitner (Citation1982), examination of value satisfaction value chain Gallarza et al. (Citation2019), perceived customer value Sweeney and Soutar (Citation2001), the roles of the physical environment, price perception, and customer satisfaction in determining customer loyalty in the restaurant industry (Han & Ryu, Citation2009).
Discussion
Service quality and customer satisfaction have been deeply rooted in the discipline of business management. It was found that tourism and hospitality researchers have made impressive progress in research these important variables in business success. Tourism and hospitality industry are highly customer-focused and quality of service is a major source of competitive advantage. The survival and success of tourism and hospitality businesses depends on an organization’s ability to meet the quality benchmarks and exceed customer expectations of service quality. There has been a steady growth of publications in the SQCS field from 2006 onwards, which reemphasizes the significance of the research area.
The findings of the study show that researchers from Asia contributed more publications, followed by North America and Europe. Asian researchers continue to maintain their productivity rate in terms of the yearly number of publications. A close review of the publication growth shows that China, accounts for most of the researches on SQCS in tourism and hospitality in Asian region, which is followed by South Korea. The USA is the leading country in North America, which produced the second highest number of publications in the research area. Researchers from Australia, Spain and the UK also contribute substantially, but the share of other countries is comparatively very less. Most of the research themes discussed demonstrate the importance of customer satisfaction in business success.
IJHM and IJCHM were two major sources of research on SQCS in tourism and hospitality. It is found that many researchers prompted to publish the findings of their researches in these journals. Most of the articles published in these journals directly dealt with consumer behavior in the varying business environment and its effect on SQCS. Authors attempted to identify antecedents, consequences and proposed empirical models on SQCS. Publications by Ryu and Han (Citation2009), Han and Ryu (Citation2009), and Kim et al. (Citation2009) were found to be the most impactful in the data set based on the share of local citations against global citations.
The Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) analysis of the chronological growth of SQCS cited references (CR) from 1948 to 2020, showed peaks in the year 2000 (CR-2432), and in the year 2010 (2613). The spectrogram shows that publications by Baker and Crompton (Citation2000), Cronin et. al., (Citation2000), Chen and Chen (Citation2010) were found as highly relevant to the SQCS research area. The two most relevant papers that contributed to the development of the empirical researches in SQCS were Fornell et al., (1981) and Hair et al. (Citation2010).
The conceptual structure of the bibliometrics in R is examined through co-occurrence network, thematic evolution and factorial analysis. The co-occurrence analysis of keywords plus revealed three major clusters and one minor cluster. The first cluster reiterates the most profound theme; factors determining customer satisfaction which is widely used in SQCS research. The main theme of second cluster are performance antecedents, consequences, and performance. The third cluster highlights major themes such as satisfaction, impact, and quality.
It was found that customer satisfaction remains to be in transversal subject in the thematic evolution mapping. It explains the changes in the research themes based on research publications from 1998 to 2016 and 2016 to 2020. The findings highlight the emergence of new subsegments in SQCS research in HLTS. In the beginning of this millennium, researches focused on describing the measurement models of customer satisfaction, whereas researches were more focused on customer experience management. Organizations realized the poser of word of mouth and reviews in internet media, hence many researchers ventured in researches expediting the role of new media, information technology, and importance of quality of offering influence customer satisfaction. Some of the new researches worked on factors influencing behavioral intention of customers and the role of trust and loyalty as antecedents of satisfaction.
The summary of co-citation analysis demonstrates key findings of the study. Researches on SQCS has been deeply rooted in the discipline of business studies. The first group of publications appeared in scholarly journals such as Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing research, Journal of Retailing, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Academy of the Marketing Science and Journal of Services Marketing made the foundation for different thematic areas, which were widely used by researchers in the later years. The findings of the earlier researches were significant enough to create directions for SQCS researches in HLTS. This was also helpful in introducing management orientation in HLTS research and approach the research area scientifically.
Authors such as Oliver (Citation1980), Zeithaml (Citation1996), Baker and Crompton (Citation2000) contributed to the development of the research theme quality, satisfaction, and behavioral intentions on SQCS. Parasuraman et al. (Citation1985), (Citation1988) and Cronin (Citation1992)established their focus area as the measurement of service quality. Zeithaml (Citation1988), Cronin (Citation2000), Chen and Chen (Citation2010) worked on the theme of perceptions of price, quality, perceived value and satisfaction. Fornell (1981), and Anderson (1988) developed the structural equation model as an evaluation model. Oliver (Citation1997, Citation1999) shifted the focus into the behavioral perspective of the customer and satisfaction. The second group of journals that contributed to the development of the research themes in SQCS is International Journal of Hospitality Management, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing, and Journal of Hospitality Research. Authors contributed for the development of SQCS research in the second cluster are Kim et al. (Citation2009), and Han & Ryu (Citation2009). The third cluster of journals that contributed to the advancement of the study area are Tourism Management, Annals of Tourism Research and Journal of Travel Research. Some of the authors contributed the growth of SQCS research are Chen and Chen (Citation2010), Chi and Qu (Citation2008), Bigne et al. (Citation2001), Yoon and Uysal (Citation2006), and Baker and Crompton (Citation2000).
The study further concludes that SQCS has been a widely used research theme in HLTS research. Though the research collaborations spread over all continents, it is found that the research collaboration among countries of Africa and South America are very less in the academic research on SQCS in HLST category. This indicates a limited focus on SQCS research in these countries. This study also showed SQCS research in a range of tourism and hospitality research settings, employing several research themes, which reflect its increasing importance and the progress the sector has made as an academic discipline. This study provides tourism and hospitality managers insights into the emerging trends and themes in SQCS and translates the theoretical and practical approaches into working models to strengthen customer relationships and satisfaction within their organizations. The increasing focus on SQCS will help the tourism and hospitality industry to become more efficient, competitive and sustainable. The study helps management researchers and scholars appreciate the shift in paradigms and thrust areas of SQCS research, opening up new directions for future research on SQCS implications for tourism and hospitality.
Conclusion
The present research analyses the research publications related to SQCS from the WoS database for the period 1998–2019, using the R-Bibliometix package for performance analysis and science mapping. With its systematic assessment of research published over a given period, the bibliometric analysis helps understand the scope and depth of SQCS research in tourism and hospitality and evaluate its contribution to knowledge. The present research examined the growth of SQCS publications, the impact of sources, top publications, longitudinal citation analysis, trending topics, thematic evolution, and co-occurrence and co-citation analysis.
There has been significant growth in SQCS research publications in tourism and hospitality during the study period. The vast majority of SQCS research in tourism and hospitality followed a quantitative research methodology, indicating a bias toward positivistic epistemology (Levers, Citation2013). Majority of publications on SQCS during the study period followed quantitative methods (699 out of 740). The study demonstrated the most impactful publications that contributed to the development of the knowledge base of SQCS in HLST. Themes emerged over the years demonstrate the development of technological tools to understand customer behavior in terms of cognitive and psychological factors. The study also described the intellectual and social structure of the researches in SQCS.
A study of the abstracts revealed that publications analyzed in this study indicate that the research has been conducted to measure SQCS in a wide range of tourism settings, which include airlines, airports, convention centers ski resorts, casinos, luxury hotels, mid-scale hotels, hostels, home stay, Air BnB, restaurants, travel agents’ services, tourist destinations, festivals, events, reefs, rural tourism, theme parks, museum, resort hotels, green lodges, outdoor recreation, golf courses, Island tourism, medical tourism, marine tourism, events, festivals and wine tourism. The focus of many researches was to build statistical models explaining relationship between key variables such as customer engagement, behavior intention, service failure, service recovery, customer employee-rapport, website service quality, experiential quality, experiential marketing and e-service quality. Researches on SQCS resulted in the introduction of scientific methods to measure customer satisfaction such as holiday happiness curve, tourist satisfaction index, E-service quality (E-S- QUAL), Resort Hotel Service Performance (RESERV), DINESERV, and Muslim Customer Perceived Value (MCPV). The recent years witnessed the intervention of technology in SQCS research. It is also found that some researchers started using machine learning and artificial intelligence to study the patterns of customer behavior. The theoretical approaches followed by scholars to frame their research include Diffusive Attribution Theory, Means End Theory, Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), Field Theory and Cognitive Appraisal Theory.
Looking at the trend in SQCS research in hospitality and tourism, it was found that researchers are no longer confined to one particular approach such as testing statistical models on customer satisfaction. The body of knowledge is supplemented with the findings of new research in this area. Application of artificial intelligence, big data analysis and machine learning in SQCS signals the growth of information technology assisted research to examine and analyze customer satisfaction.
Implications
The study provides a number of key points that have practical implications. Tourism businesses have already been affected by the pandemic in 2020 and a recovery is only possible with appropriate business strategies. Ensuring service quality being the most important task of tourism business organizations, the study provides the following recommendations. First, managers and entrepreneurs in tourism should pay attention to the following key points that are identified as emerging research themes: physical environment of the service setting, relationship quality between staff and customers and continuous customer engagement.
Second, as customers pay much attention to reviews shared in social media and other communication networks, which act as the gateway to form perceptions and influence decision-making process, continuous customer engagement via social media is the key to reinforce loyalty and satisfaction. Third, managers may also use the innovative tools of information technology to assess the customer emotions, efficiency of service and communicating value of offering in order to perform well in the competitive business environment. Improving service quality and customer satisfaction is a challenge for every organization in its pursuit of sustainable competitive advantage. Fourth, mangers should be aware that service delivery is one part of the supply chain. It is important to fix the lapses by analyzing the people and process involved in the service delivery so that service failure can be avoided.
The present study will be helpful to the researchers and academic community to understand the emerging paradigms of academic research in service quality and customer satisfaction. Bibliometric tools detected the most discussed themes and impactful publications over last two decades. This could be of great use for new researchers to design research in the said area and set their priorities. Findings of the present research would help the readers to understand the spread of the research area covered under service quality and customer satisfaction researches in tourism and hospitality. The present study also provides a detailed insight on development of research themes, methods used by researchers and recent developments. Cited reference list and the cluster of research themes will enable researchers to select appropriate means and methods.
Limitations and future research
Although this study makes an important contribution to SQCS research in tourism and hospitality, its scope was limited to the Web of Science database. There are many databases such as Scopus and PubMed, Google Scholar, etc., that contain scholarly publications, which were not used in this study. However, comprising a longer time horizon of publications, the Web of Science citation data is considered to be accurate and reproducible (Falagas et al. (Citation2008) and represent a reliable source that contains a comprehensive range of SQCS research publications that appeared in scholarly journals during the study period. Therefore, the outcomes of the study are valid and relevant.
While revealing the emerging trends and theses in SQCS research in tourism and hospitality, this study identified many gaps in the literature. These include the relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction, the relationship between SQCS and employee morale and job satisfaction, barriers to promoting SQCS in tourism and hospitality, and the role of SQCS in improving sustainability and destination competitiveness. Many researches were conducted in the hospitality sector, whereas the researches on role of SQCS in destination management were found to be critically less.
Further, there is immense scope to expand SQCS research beyond the traditional sectors of the tourism and hospitality industry to the sharing economy and the digital businesses. There appears to be a mismatch in the volume of SQCS research in developing and advanced economies. With their inherent weaknesses in achieving quality and competitiveness, there is the need to research the scope, barriers and enablers of SQCS in businesses and institutions in the developing countries. Further, there seems to be relatively less research on quality management techniques such as Kaizen, Six Sigma, Lean Methods, Cost of Quality (CoQ), European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model within the tourism and hospitality sector. Researching these themes would not only help advance the knowledge base on quality management but would help improve quality standards and competitiveness of the tourism and hospitality industry. Future research may also investigate the findings of SQCS researches in similar contexts conducted in different geographical regions so that the customer perceptions in diverse settings and cultural backgrounds can be ascertained and studied.
Acknowledgments
Authors would like to thank the suggestions made by reviewers to improve the paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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