Perceived Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction in Romanian Rural Pensions: a Pilot Study

For the providers of lodging services, especially those in a developing market such as agrotourism, it is important to define and to measure service quality. The current study aims to diagnose the applicability of an adapted perceived quality scale to Romanian consumers who have chosen rural pensions as their holiday accommodation. The sample used consists of Romanian students visiting several rural pensions all across the country. The sampling method was non-probability convenience sampling, while the survey instrument was adapted from Parasuraman et al. (1994), and four other instruments specifically made for lodging services. For statistics the IBM SPSS ver. 20.0 was employed, in order to calculate means, standard deviation and frequencies, regression analysis was used to observe the causal relationship between independent variables and customer satisfaction and the dimensionality of the scale was verified through exploratory factor analysis. Research limitations: this research is limited by the sample study, which is quite small and consists only of Romanian students who stayed in the analysed rural pensions; and also by the fact that measurement of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction was carried out using only a single item scale, which does limit the estimation of reliability. Importance of research: the Romanian hospitality industry suffers from the small amount of research done on both customer satisfaction and perceived quality service. There are literally no studies done on rural pensions and very few studies focusing on hotels. As the number of rural pensions grows each year and agro-tourism becomes more and more competitive, it is important that rural pensions’ owners and managers listen to the voice of the consumer, and doing so, discover the areas that offer the most satisfaction, those that can still be improved and those that should be developed further. The results and implications of the current research are a starting point for further studies that need to be developed in an area largely ignored until now.