Front Office Staff’s Performance of Services Relating to Tourist Attractions: Understanding the Service Delivery of Hotel Concierges

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.