Guests’ Perspective of Hotel Design Quality-A Questionnaire Survey of Hotel Guests in Lagos Metropolis

Abstract

The building is an important part of a hotel offering, whose quality must be improved towards achieving better guests satisfaction. The quality of a building is directly associated with the quality of its architectural design, which is why several studies have established a relationship between hotel design quality, and its guests’ satisfaction. As the possible input resources of hotel design, management and financing are ever limited, it has become necessary to examine design quality itself, in this case in terms of its constituents, and identify which aspects of it mostly impact hotel guests’ satisfaction decision. This paper, therefore, aimed to identify the perspective in which guests assess the design quality of hotels, with the explicit objectives of identifying and grading the extent of the impact of each dimension of design quality on guests’ satisfaction. Employing the philosophical framework of the Design Quality Indicator (DQI) tool with its design quality dimensions, however with the addition of hotel atmospherics aspect obtained from literature, this is a quantitative study, using data obtained from 333 administered questionnaires, spread across sixteen hotels - one from each of the sixteen federal approved local government areas of Lagos metropolis. Design quality was found to be a significant predictor of guests’ satisfaction; and also Hotel Atmospherics, as a dimension of design quality, emerged as the only significant predictor of guests’ satisfaction, as well as having the strongest singular relationship with it amongst other dimensions of design quality.