THE USE OF IPA IN THE ANALYSIS OF CUSTOMER SATISFACTION IN THE HOTEL INDUSTRY

Customer satisfaction with service quality is one of the fundamental goals of hotel enterprises. Numerous specifics of hotel services (intangibility, inability to storage, etc.) make this goal hard to reach, and thus hotels invest enormous efforts in identification of guests' needs, in order to adjust their supply. The aim of this paper is to identify weaknesses and advantages of the selected hotel attributes by analysis of guests' importance and performance evaluation. The respondents were accommodated in four and five-star hotels in Serbia. In order to identify the weak points that could enable managers to raise the quality of services, the IPA method (Importance-Performance Analysis) was used. The results obtained reveal that guests are generally satisfied with the hotel attributes they consider highly important, while it is not the case with those less important. Furthermore, certain differences could be observed between the guests who stayed in city hotels and those in mountain and spa hotels.