Evaluation of Customer Experience and Satisfaction in Luxury Resort Hotels of the Maldives

Lyudmila POPP; Zamira MUKHAMBETOVA; Botagoz MATAYEVA; Gulzhan KUNAFINA; Almagul NURGALIYEVA; Vera VOLOKHINA; Ayagoz ZHANSAGIMOVA

Lyudmila POPP NAO "Toraigyrov University", Kazakhstan
Zamira MUKHAMBETOVA Saken Seifullin Kazakh Agrotechnical University, Kazakhstan
Botagoz MATAYEVA Karaganda Economic University of Kazpotrebsoyuz, Kazakhstan
Gulzhan KUNAFINA Saken Seifullin Kazakh Agrotechnical University, Kazakhstan
Almagul NURGALIYEVA Kazakh University of Technology and Business, Kazakhstan
Vera VOLOKHINA Orenburg State University, Russian Federation
Ayagoz ZHANSAGIMOVA Kazakh Academy Sport and Tourism, Kazakhstan

Abstract

In today's environments, defining, analyzing, evaluating and managing customer experiences is a significant part of hotel marketing for effective positioning and differentiation. The customer experience in interacting with a hotel is linked to the overall satisfaction, as well as the desire to come back and recommend a hotel (Nobar & Rostamzadeh 2018).

Feedback of customers is an important source of information for hospitality industry and a powerful tool that can help to analyze and understand customer satisfaction, it’s contributing factors and improve service quality. This was a time-consuming task during pre-digital era. Today, social media and the websites such as tripadvisor, booking.com, agoda.com etc., have made data about customer experience and impression available and easy to access.

There are a few research papers which study impact of service quality and attributes on customer satisfaction in Maldives hotel industry, those studies were mainly based on the results of surveys conducted in one or a few hotels. As per the author’s best knowledge there is no comprehensive research on relationship between overall customer’s satisfaction and specific attributes in Maldives luxury hotels as well research, based on reviews and rating available at the web-sites using as Four Realms experience model. For the purpose of this research totally 81 four- and five-stars hotels at Maldives were studied, hotel’s overall scores based on 23808 customers feedbacks were reviewed and analyzed. The booking.com site has been used as the primary source of the data.

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