Abstract:
Over the past few decades, hotel guests’ service expectations grew from services such as check-in and
check-out (Cobanoglu, Corbaci, Moreo & Ekinci, 2003) to expecting hotels to, amongst others,
provide services relating to tourist attractions (Adler & Gordon, 2013; Yeh, Leong, Blecher & Hu,
2005). Despite these developments, South Africa (SA) is amongst the countries confronted by the
minimal utilisation of tourist attractions (National Department of Tourism, 2012) and the tourists’ lack
of awareness of tourist attractions within major destinations, such as Cape Town (City of Cape Town,
2013) and Durban (eThekwini Municipality, 2014). By providing tourists with services relating to
tourist attractions, hotels are likely to contribute towards addressing the minimal utilisation and lack
of awareness of tourist attractions. Guest orientation (Lee, 2014), self-efficacy (Jaiswal & Dhar, 2015),
motivation (Hon & Leung, 2011) and effort (Marić, Marinković, Marić & Dimitrovski, 2016) are
constructs that impact on the service performance of hotel staff. However, studies have not been
conducted to determine the impact of these constructs on the performance of hotel staff relating to
tourist attractions. This paper forms part of a PhD study in progress which explores the constructs
(Guest orientation, Self-efficacy, Motivation and Effort) that impact on hotel staff’s performance of
services relating to tourist attractions. The PhD adopted a qual-QUANT research method to, in phase
1, qualitatively identify emerging themes from each construct, which will be quantitatively
investigated in phase 2. This paper stems from phase 1 and aims to identify via qualitative research the
key themes that emerge in each of the four constructs that are associated with hotel staff’s performance
of services relating to tourist attractions. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with four
certified hotel concierges belonging to Les Clefs d’ Or in SA. Thematic coding was used to identify
the themes emerging from the qualitative data. Eight themes emerged from Guest orientation, five
from Self-efficacy, seven from Motivation and ten from Effort.
