Hotel room attendants’ delivery of quality service

Abstract

Illuminating the physical difficulties experienced by hotel room attendants in delivering service quality at five-star hotels on the Gold Coast region of South East Queensland, Australia, our research was founded on socialist-feminist and critical theory epistemologies. In-depth interviews were conducted with a sample of 46 hotel room attendants. We used a qualitative, social-constructivist, grounded theory methodology to render the empirical material into a basic social structural process of tasking. Tasking offers a conceptual framework of room attendants’ daily employment experiences as they transform hotel rooms to prescribed standards. Tasking illustrates the high physical demands placed on room attendants, tantamount to exploitation from their own perspectives. Tasking contributes to research on employment experiences in hospitality, particularly on hotel praxis, delivery of quality customer service and the operational demands placed on room attendants. This paper presents the results of the first in-depth examination of the daily functions and roles of hotel room attendants.