Abstract
Maldives is a renowned tourist destination in the world, growing rapidly within a competitive national and international environment. With similar service provided across the industry, differentiating through service quality is identified as the most imperative way to succeed and sustain in the business. Although design and process of service quality measurement is not fully conceptualized given the complexity of service characteristics, majority of academics have agreed that it should be assessed through the lens of customer expectations and their perceptions. SERVQUAL instrument is the most prominent tool used in this regard and hence, their dimensions will be used to assess the alignment between customer, employee and management’s perception of service quality for the five star resort island under study.
The objectives of this study will identify the key determinants of perception of service quality between the stakeholders and find out how this gap is formed between customer expectations and employee/management perception of this expectation. It will also investigate how these dimensions vary according to the guest nationality to understand the cultural context. Europe and Asia is used for the cultural cluster analysis, following the similar segmentation in the government and resort publications. It is found that there is no congruence of service quality perception between the stakeholders. However, there is significant correlation between Europe and Asian guest, having high priority for tangibility, assurance and reliability. The three areas investigated-communication, structure and marker research, of how the gap form underlines, the importance of soliciting the feedback, harnessing accommodating culture and being proactive to sustain service quality. The generalizing of the findings should be treated cautiously due to the small sample size of customers accessible.