Benefits of Quality Certification in Hotels: The impact of motives and the usage of quality tools

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 analyze 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.