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528 service
include the aesthetic appeal of the restaurant decor,
the feeling of care provided by the treatment from
the service staff, the status derived from visiting a
prestigious operation and the like. Fourth, supporting
facility is the physical environment that must
be in place before a service can be offered. For a
restaurant, this would include the physical structure
of the building, the internal decor including all
the furnishings and fittings both front and back of
house as well as the car park and external
landscaping.
The special characteristics of service operations
mean that their management should be treated
differently from that of other production systems.
These characteristics have been described by many
authors under slightly different terminology, but
four are particularly common. The first characteristic
is intangibility. Services are often described as
being intangible, or at least a lot less tangible than
goods. While the purchaser of a product has the
opportunity to see, touch, hear, smell or taste it, this
is not the case for pure services, which may be
better described as ideas or concepts rather than
things. The tourism sector, however, does not
consist solely of pure services but of hybrids that
combine product and service features. Hospitality
operations, for example, do not just consist
of the service performance and the intangible
factors that affect this interaction. A large part of
hospitality consists of tangible product elements.
On the product side, there are the tangible
elements of the food, drink or accommodation
itself, but there are also the intangible elements of
the built environment. On the service side, there
are the intangible elements of the friendliness or
care offered by the hospitality provider, but at the
same time, it is possible to identify tangible service
elements such as the time taken to deliver the
service or the effectiveness of the service performed.
The second characteristic is heterogeneity.
While manufacturing operations may be able to
guarantee the consistency of the output from the
production process, there is a great deal of
variability in the output from a single service
operation or indeed from a single service employee,
largely brought about by the combination of the
intangible nature of the service and the presence of
the customer at the point of production. It is
difficult to ensure consistent quality from the same
employee from day to day, and harder still to get
compatibility between employees; yet this will
crucially affect the nature of the service that the
customer receives. Although a customer may
expect some variability in the service offered, the
range of tolerance on the product side seems to be
much lower.
The third characteristic is simultaneity. Services
cannot be moved through distribution channels.
Customers usually must come to the service facility
or the provider must be brought to the customer, as
in the case of home delivery pizza. A service
business can only operate a limited geographical
area, and while a customer may travel many
thousands of miles to a particular tourism destination,
the location of a hotel within a resort may be
crucial. For the same reason, services cannot be
counted, measured, inspected, tested or verified
before sale for subsequent delivery to the customer,
and this places a premium on the quality
assurance function of the operation.
The fourth characteristic is perishability.
Services cannot be stored, so removing the buffer
of an inventory can be used to cope with
fluctuations in customer demand. An airplane seat
is a very perishable product. Empty places cannot
be stockpiled for a busy day sometime in the future.
Once a seat has been left empty, the potential
revenue from the occupation of that space is lost. If
the demand for tourism services did not fluctuate,
then it would be possible to set the capacity of the
service at the level of demand, and few scheduling
or out-of-stock situations would occur. Unfortunately,
tourism and hospitality services face dramatic
and volatile changes in demand on an
annual, daily and even hourly basis, and managing
capacity becomes one of the major preoccupations
of management.
Services can be considered from a variety of
angles, each of which has its own distinct focus,
with its own literature and research base. First, the
service economy theme focuses on the role of
service industries within the economy. Key concerns
are definitions of service industries and
service occupations, the changing role and
importance of services within developing and
developed economies and the impact of service
productivity on the economy as a whole. As