Evaluation of service quality of the hotel managements including sport tourism in terms of athletes

Today, tourism is identified as a significant field in tourism industry. Tourism sector, besides submitting job offers to large mass by having a positive effect on domestic income, especially while bringing the foreign currency in which developing countries need for investments, it is also considered as the most important tool of advertising for those countries. Tourism enterprises, the importance of which increase day by day in service industry, focus on concept of service quality for providing customer satisfaction and making this satisfaction permanent. In this process, tourism enterprises strive to meet customer expectations by regularly measuring service quality. One of the most critical points in meeting the customers' expectations is correctly identifying the customer and accurately interpreting the customers' wishes and expectations. It is especially important for hotel companies in sport tourism to research and understand the costumer's way of perceiving the service quality by scientific methods in order that they can make the right orientations and for their future position and investments. From this point of view, this study was carried out with purpose of developing a valid and reliable measurement tool to measure the quality of services offered by sports hotels to the sportsmen and sportswomen, determining their service quality perception scores with this developed measurement tool and suggesting managerial and physical measures for hotel managements to be taken in the direction of obtained findings. This research, planned with respect to this purpose, was done by using cross-sectional approach, one of the general scanning models, and relational scan model. The population of the study also constituted the sample group of it. The sample group consisted of 389 athletes including 247 males and 142 females selected from team athletes and individual athletes playing in football, volleyball, basketball leagues of 2016-2017 Turkish leagues via disproportionate element sampling method. Survey technique was used as data collection tool in the research. For this purpose, "Sports Tourism Service Quality Scale" was developed by exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis by the researcher. In this stage of scale development, primarily the literature was reviewed in depth and a question pool consisting of 62 items was created as a result of meetings with the experts of the subject and applied to 168 athletes for explanatory factor analysis. As a result of this application, it was determined that the scale consists of 34 items and 6 sub –dimensions. Confirmatory factor analysis was implemented to this scale by re –applying this new structure consisting of 34 items and 6 sub –dimensions to 389 athletes. As result of this analysis, it was observed that the scale consists of 28 items and 5 sub-dimensions. Finally, factors were defined by looking at the alpha internal consistency values of a scale and sub-dimensions. The first sub-dimension "Sport Field" consisted of items (1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 19) and 28 and =0,96, the second sub-dimension "Employees" consisted of items (9, 16, 18, 21, 23, 26) and =0,82, the third sub–dimension "Entertainment" consisted of (14, 20, 24, 25) items and =0,90, the fourth sub-dimension "Hygiene" composed of (4, 5, 6) items and =0,85, and lastly the fifth sub-dimension "Hotel Chamber" consisted of (24,27) items and was determined as 0,80. ( 0,80). Cronbach Alpha internal consistency values of total scale were found as =0.96. Scale items were scored with 10 Point-Likert as (ranging from 1= I do not participate at all to 10= I totally agree). In the analysis of obtained data; the frequency distributions related to the demographic characteristics of the athletes were determined by descriptive statistics method. Parametric Hypothesis Tests were used as the obtained data about the independents variables show homogenous distribution at p>0,05 level. T-test for differences between gender, marital status and service (ANOVA) quality sub-dimensions; one-way variance analysis for differences between education level, classification, sports branch, hotel class, hotel length of stay, location of the hotel and service quality sub-dimensions; and Tukey Post-hoc analysis when there were differences among groups for determining which groups the difference originated from were performed. The relationship between age, monthly income, sport year and service quality sub-dimensions was examined by Pearson Correlation analysis. The level of significance of the study was accepted as p<0,05 level. At the end of the study, it was determined that the arithmetic average of the perception scores of athletes was high in the hotel room, hygiene and employee sub-dimensions, and moderate in the sports field and entertainment sub-dimensions. In the branch variable, it was seen that the perceptions of service quality of individual athletes differ significantly from team athletes in the employees and hygiene sub-dimensions and individual athletes had higher averages. According to the marital status variable, it was found that there was a significant difference between the service quality perception score in the employees sub-dimension and that the married ones had a higher average than the single ones. When the difference between the duration of service was examined, it was found that there were significant differences in the sport field and the employees sub-dimensions and the average of those staying for five days and over was higher than those staying for one or two days and three or four days. It was detected that there was a significant difference between the host hotel class and the sport area of the quality of service, employees, hygiene and entertainment sub-dimensions. When which groups the differences originated from was examined, it was seen that the differences were in favour of the five-star hotel. It was revealed that age, sport year and income statue variables and sport field subscale had a slight significant correlation in a positive way. There was not any significant difference between education, gender and classification variables and service quality.