Internal Marketing in Tourism: The Case of Human Resource Empowerment on Greek Hotels

Abstract

Modern marketing is customer-oriented and investigates how to contact and promote the sale of its products and what products are best suited to meet its needs. The quality of products and especially of services depends mainly on the way they are offered by employees. Deficiencies in the quality of products and services lose importance to customers when the willingness of employees to offer them is genuinely positive, while well-organized businesses receive plenty of complaints when employee behavior is cautious and bureaucratic. Internal marketing promotes products initially to employees, and when they are convinced of the value of products, they offer them to customers. Internal marketing is not only for front-line workers but for all company staff. For example, in a hotel the maid may not meet the client but must show personal interest in the cleanliness of the room and the excellent operation of his equipment. If the maid did not find a burned lamp reading lamp for the third day, the customer will feel that the hotel is not interested in the accommodation conditions. Τhe aim of this paper is to analyse the case of internal marketing practices and how it can be used so to leverage the quality of the services provided from a hotel. This is a literature review which relies on the most recent publications. The final outcome is that there is a need to pay more attention on the personnel of Greek hotels and to have some well-established policies on this issue. Furthermore, the paper makes a recommendation for future quantitative research so to examine the views of the employees on the internal marketing practices and policies.