Evaluation of guest requirements on hotel building facilities in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Tourism is one of the major economic areas in the Sri Lankan Policy Framework, with a vision to make Sri Lanka the foremost leisure destination in the South Asian Region. After ending the 30 years of ethnic war, the tourism industry has gained an immense level of significance as a potential mode of investment and attracting foreign currency to the economy. Sri Lanka recently has achieved the ambitious post war target of 600,000 tourist arrivals showing a 73 percent growth with compared to the previous year. Sri Lankan government therefore focuses on fast emerging tourism sector with the central focus of providing low cost holidays with high quality hotel accommodation. The government is committed to develop tourist sector with targeted room capacity of 30,000 by 2015. In order to achieve aforementioned targets, it is essential to identify and evaluate guest requirements and their preferences. The main aim of this study is therefore to identify and evaluate guest requirements in Sri Lankan structured questionnaire hotel sector. Literature review and preliminary survey were used to identify guest requirements. Structured questionnaire survey was used to collect data and Analytic Hierarchy Process tool was applied to analyse and prioritise guest requirements. According to the survey findings, 'location' is the most important guest requirement followed by 'room facilities', 'entertainment and recreational facilities' and 'appearance '. Survey further identified, 'Value added facilities' and 'building services and supplementary facilities' as least important guest requirements in jive-star hotels in Sri Lanka. The aforementioned jindings of this study can be used to improve the hotel building facilities in order to achieve guest satisfaction.