Developing Service Orientation Culture in Luxury Hotels

Purpose - In hotels it is important to adopt both customer and service orientation. This implies not only responding to customer's requests, but also striving to anticipate, recognize and meet customer needs and expectations. In order to obtain these objectives, structures, systems and people have to act simultaneously by creating a corporate culture focused on service orientation. This paper aims to explore the service orientation culture (SOC) construct and how managers develop it within their hotels by highlighting possible cultural differences. Design/methodology/approach - We propose a qualitative approach conducted by means of in-depth interviews to luxury hotels managers belonging to different countries. Originality/value - The findings emphasize the close relationship between customer and service orientation. In the luxury hotels considered in the study these concepts are inseparable because delivering successfully services to guests requires to meet, remember and anticipate their needs and expectations. This work also highlights the usefulness of videos and vignette to help hotel staff to remind how it needs to behave during some situations. Further, the propensity to SOC should vary according to the variety of target customers. Practical implications - The results suggest to hotel managers to develop SOC by investing in the creation of a service-oriented corporate culture (including corporate values, brand values, customer focus culture, traditions of national hospitality culture, golden rules), its communication within the hotel, as well as related employees' training.