Theory and practice in research of quality in tourism services in international journals: a literature review of 2002 to 2012

Abstract

This article presents a literature review on quality in tourism services based on journal articles indexed in databases. The documents were selected in fifteen databases, filtered and 105 resulting articles were read and fully evaluated by the method of content analysis. Among the main results are a conceptual matrix for the quality of tourist services and a number of gaps and opportunities for future research. The most significant results are: (1) definition of the causal relationship between service quality and loyalty of the tourist to tourist destination; (2) the literature does not consider the differences between the client of a tour company and the tourist and they deserved treatment differentiated; (3) low theoretical discussion on the issue, which gives scope for further research in the area; (4) research on quality in tourism services is supported by theories of marketing, and require the contribution from other areas of knowledge; (5 ) excessive use of general models for quality measurement, such as SERVQUAL; (6) excess empirical studies with methodological mistakes caused by sampling scientifically inconsistent; (7) quality measurement focused on customer perception and immediate reaction to the event which ignores the multiple elements of the supply chain of the tourism trade.