Internal and external drivers for quality certification in the service industry: Do they have different impacts on success?

This paper presents the results of a study of hotels that are certified for

quality management to identify the reasons for seeking quality certification. The authors

analyse whether internal or external drivers for seeking certification have different

impacts on benefits and the use of quality tools in the hotel industry. The analysis groups

hotels according to the importance of their internal reasons for certification, and uses

cluster analysis to identify the significant differences between groups of hotels. The

findings for the 32 hotels analysed show that hotels that pursued certification for internal

reasons develop better quality tools and have increased levels of benefits