Cultural Influences on Services for Hospitality- myassignmenthelp

Question: Discuss about theCultural Influences on Services for Hospitality Industry. Answer: The tourism and hospitality industry depends on the perceptions of the tourist. Only the positive perceptions can add success for the tourism and hospitality industry. These perceptions of people depend heavily on the services that the hotel provides to them. Right from the services provided by the hotel-staffs, sales people, and flight attendants to waitress, each of the service providers decides the gross perceptions of their service quality. No matter how excellent the accommodation, places of attractions, transportation and other activities are; the tourist will only attract to them if the service quality provided to them is up to their expectations. Poor services will make tourists feel that they are unwelcome. Tourists perceptions are subjective and they depend upon their own cultural profile and standards. These cultural standards and profile define high quality services. The cultural needs and expectations of the tourists are when met, the service quality of the hotel is perceived as good by them, but they do not, the service quality is perceived as poor. Their national culture influences their expectations from the services and what is perceived to be a proper guest treatment (Reisinger, 2014). The services that are considered as good quality service in U.S, which is of individualistic culture; may not be considered the same in China or Japan as there they have collectivistic culture, which is different from the former. For example, in China they believe that occupying every moment of the tourists time demonstrates courtesy and therefore, they usually ignores the expectations of their guests and escorts them everywhere. They provide their guests with high itinerary and they do not allow their guests to enjoy on their own. On the other hand, the Western tourists are likely to consider such attributes as an intrusion of their privacy. They perceive such service of China as uncomfortable and frustrating. Similarly, the Western culture of not foreseeing the needs of the guests in advance and providing leisure time to them to do things ac cording to their own wishes might be negatively perceived by the Japanese tourists and this may influence their overall satisfaction level with the Western hospitality. Hence, the cultural differences in tourists expectations have the potential to develop negative perceptions. Furthermore, the perceptions and expectation of the service quality also depends on the cultural distance between the customers and the providers. The closer the culture of the tourist concerning experiencing cross cultural encounter, the more critical are the tourists concerning perceiving service quality. Also, the more away the guests are from encountering the cross-cultural, the more tolerant and less demanding they will be regarding the service quality. It is also to be noted that the cultural differences is important for only few particular dimensions of service quality. The tourists are less critical and more tolerant of experiences that involve authentic products or services. They are more critical concerning the services that are with shared values like shopping, transportation services etc. Increase in travel exposure leads to converging as well as universal service quality demands, especially concerning technical quality dimension. Transportation facilities (both to and from the destination), convenience of travel, customer orientation are important to every tourists because of globally shared values. Cultural differences is influencing the perception and evaluation of service quality standard as waiting times, added service elements as well as the alternative of transportation. Hence, it can be said that cultural differences plays a vital role in the process of influencing the guests perception and the evaluation of the criteria for service quality. References: Reisinger, Y. (2014).International tourism: culture and Behavior(2nd ed.). Milton park,Abingdon,oxon,uk: Routledge.