UNDERSTANDING COUNTRY CLUB MEMBERS’ LOYALTY: FACTORS AFFECTING MEMBERSHIP RENEWAL DECISIONS

Many private country clubs across the United States have experienced a declining or flat membership and smaller waitlists of members wanting to join. The objective of this study was to investigate whether member involvement, service quality, and perceived value, influence member satisfaction and intention to renew membership for members of private country clubs. An online survey instrument customized for the country club industry was distributed to members of two country clubs in northeast Ohio. Results indicate that involvement level of members and perceived value impact country club members’ satisfaction and intention to renew their membership. Managerial implications are discussed.

Event mining for system and service management

Modern IT infrastructures are constructed by large scale computing systems and administered by IT service providers. Manually maintaining such large computing systems is costly and inefficient. Service providers often seek automatic or semi-automatic methodologies of detecting and resolving system issues to improve their service quality and efficiency. This dissertation investigates several data-driven approaches for assisting service providers in achieving this goal. The detailed problems studied by these approaches can be categorized into the three aspects in the service workflow: 1) preprocessing raw textual system logs to structural events; 2) refining monitoring configurations for eliminating false positives and false negatives; 3) improving the efficiency of system diagnosis on detected alerts. Solving these problems usually requires a huge amount of domain knowledge about the particular computing systems. The approaches investigated by this dissertation are developed based on event mining algorithms, which are able to automatically derive part of that knowledge from the historical system logs, events and tickets. ^ In particular, two textual clustering algorithms are developed for converting raw textual logs into system events. For refining the monitoring configuration, a rule based alert prediction algorithm is proposed for eliminating false alerts (false positives) without losing any real alert and a textual classification method is applied to identify the missing alerts (false negatives) from manual incident tickets. For system diagnosis, this dissertation presents an efficient algorithm for discovering the temporal dependencies between system events with corresponding time lags, which can help the administrators to determine the redundancies of deployed monitoring situations and dependencies of system components. To improve the efficiency of incident ticket resolving, several KNN-based algorithms that recommend relevant historical tickets with resolutions for incoming tickets are investigated. Finally, this dissertation offers a novel algorithm for searching similar textual event segments over large system logs that assists administrators to locate similar system behaviors in the logs. Extensive empirical evaluation on system logs, events and tickets from real IT infrastructures demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches.^

Hotel Guest e-questionnaires: Implications for Feedback and Relationships

This paper examines the reliability and efficacy of hotel guest e-mail questionnaire compared to the paper questionnaire in the Asian Pacific context. Conducted inPerth,SingaporeandPenang, cities with mature hospitality and tourism industries and a representation of chain and independent deluxe hotels, this exploratory qualitative study examines hotelier views of e-mail guest communication derived from content analysis of guest questionnaires format and content and in-depth interviews with senior hoteliers. The findings indicated that e-questionnaires manifested as e-mails, as a direct replacement of the paper questionnaire, appear to be premature given divergent hotelier views and shortcomings in e-mail response administration. If properly executed, e-mail can play an increasingly important adjunct role to the paper guest questionnaire as a part of a multi-channel approach. The balance/relationship between ‘high tech’ and ‘high touch’ needs to be maintained: the latter can enhance the latter but should not undermine it.

A Study of Satisfaction Level of Hong Kong Tourists with Hot Springs Hotels and Resorts in Guangdong, China

The research reported here aimed at examining Hong Kong tourists’ level of satisfaction with hot springs hotels and resorts in Guangdong, China. Primary data were collected and service quality and tourist satisfaction levels were measured using the SERVQUAL model. The empirical findings indicate that most tourists are satisfied with the service quality of these hotels and resorts. Among the different dimensions of service quality, empathy receives the highest score. Overall satisfaction receives a score only slightly better than average. The results also reveal significant relationships among customer satisfaction level, loyalty, and recommendation.

The Influence of Servicescape and Local Food Attributes on Pleasure and Revisit Intention in an Upscale-Casual Dining Restaurant

The current study looks at the relationship between servicescape, emotional product involvement, perceived quality of local foods, the positive emotion of pleasure, and revisit intention in an upscale buffet style restaurant on a university campus in the Southeastern U.S. Test results show positive relationships between all of the constructs in the proposed conceptual model. The study also gives practitioners and academics insights into practices that can help to market the use of local foods through the restaurant environment in order to engage emotionally involved customers. This marketing can illicit pleasurable feelings and increase perceived product quality of local foods with the purpose of getting customers to revisit the restaurant. Suggestions for further research on the subject are proposed.

The effects of attribute quality information and sources of information on consumers' perceptions and behavior: A model of Pre-purchase Information Utilization in Service Physical Environments

The search-experience-credence framework from economics of information, the human-environment relations models from environmental psychology, and the consumer evaluation process from services marketing provide a conceptual basis for testing the model of "Pre-purchase Information Utilization in Service Physical Environments." The model addresses the effects of informational signs, as a dimension of the service physical environment, on consumers' perceptions (perceived veracity and perceived performance risk), emotions (pleasure) and behavior (willingness to buy). The informational signs provide attribute quality information (search and experience) through non-personal sources of information (simulated word-of-mouth and non-personal advocate sources).^ This dissertation examines: (1) the hypothesized relationships addressed in the model of "Pre-purchase Information Utilization in Service Physical Environments" among informational signs, perceived veracity, perceived performance risk, pleasure, and willingness to buy, and (2) the effects of attribute quality information and sources of information on consumers' perceived veracity and perceived performance risk.^ This research is the first in-depth study about the role and effects of information in service physical environments. Using a 2 x 2 between subjects experimental research procedure, undergraduate students were exposed to the informational signs in a simulated service physical environment. The service physical environments were simulated through color photographic slides.^ The results of the study suggest that: (1) the relationship between informational signs and willingness to buy is mediated by perceived veracity, perceived performance risk and pleasure, (2) experience attribute information shows higher perceived veracity and lower perceived performance risk when compared to search attribute information, and (3) information provided through simulated word-of-mouth shows higher perceived veracity and lower perceived performance risk when compared to information provided through non-personal advocate sources. ^

3D TerraFly: Quality of service management for online interactive 3D geographic information system

3D geographic information system (GIS) is data and computation intensive in nature. Internet users are usually equipped with low-end personal computers and network connections of limited bandwidth. Data reduction and performance optimization techniques are of critical importance in quality of service (QoS) management for online 3D GIS. In this research, QoS management issues regarding distributed 3D GIS presentation were studied to develop 3D TerraFly, an interactive 3D GIS that supports high quality online terrain visualization and navigation. ^ To tackle the QoS management challenges, multi-resolution rendering model, adaptive level of detail (LOD) control and mesh simplification algorithms were proposed to effectively reduce the terrain model complexity. The rendering model is adaptively decomposed into sub-regions of up-to-three detail levels according to viewing distance and other dynamic quality measurements. The mesh simplification algorithm was designed as a hybrid algorithm that combines edge straightening and quad-tree compression to reduce the mesh complexity by removing geometrically redundant vertices. The main advantage of this mesh simplification algorithm is that grid mesh can be directly processed in parallel without triangulation overhead. Algorithms facilitating remote accessing and distributed processing of volumetric GIS data, such as data replication, directory service, request scheduling, predictive data retrieving and caching were also proposed. ^ A prototype of the proposed 3D TerraFly implemented in this research demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed QoS management framework in handling interactive online 3D GIS. The system implementation details and future directions of this research are also addressed in this thesis. ^

Realization of Differentiated Quality of Service for Wideband Code Division Multiple Access Core Network

The development of 3G (the 3rd generation telecommunication) value-added services brings higher requirements of Quality of Service (QoS). Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) is one of three 3G standards, and enhancement of QoS for WCDMA Core Network (CN) becomes more and more important for users and carriers. The dissertation focuses on enhancement of QoS for WCDMA CN. The purpose is to realize the DiffServ (Differentiated Services) model of QoS for WCDMA CN. Based on the parallelism characteristic of Network Processors (NPs), the NP programming model is classified as Pool of Threads (POTs) and Hyper Task Chaining (HTC). In this study, an integrated programming model that combines both of the two models was designed. This model has highly efficient and flexible features, and also solves the problems of sharing conflicts and packet ordering. We used this model as the programming model to realize DiffServ QoS for WCDMA CN. ^ The realization mechanism of the DiffServ model mainly consists of buffer management, packet scheduling and packet classification algorithms based on NPs. First, we proposed an adaptive buffer management algorithm called Packet Adaptive Fair Dropping (PAFD), which takes into consideration of both fairness and throughput, and has smooth service curves. Then, an improved packet scheduling algorithm called Priority-based Weighted Fair Queuing (PWFQ) was introduced to ensure the fairness of packet scheduling and reduce queue time of data packets. At the same time, the delay and jitter are also maintained in a small range. Thirdly, a multi-dimensional packet classification algorithm called Classification Based on Network Processors (CBNPs) was designed. It effectively reduces the memory access and storage space, and provides less time and space complexity. ^ Lastly, an integrated hardware and software system of the DiffServ model of QoS for WCDMA CN was proposed. It was implemented on the NP IXP2400. According to the corresponding experiment results, the proposed system significantly enhanced QoS for WCDMA CN. It extensively improves consistent response time, display distortion and sound image synchronization, and thus increases network efficiency and saves network resource.^

Quality Performance In our World: What Fast Service Should Really Mean

The service-producing industries have experienced problems in quality in the 1980s because of intense competition. The author discusses how these problems have been compounded in the fast food industry and how quality control can lead to success.

An Examination of Quality Service Perceptions in a Hotel

Perceptions of managers and employees on topics related to quality and quality service in a hotel were studied to define the term “quality” and the activity of "quality service" delivery, looking at differing definitions of the terms and the activity and the identification of problem issues relating to training, communication, recognition, and department coordination. Recommendations for action included changes in the training program, a reemphasizing of the incentive programs, the development of Quality Improvement Teams, improved communication, and increased service delivery leadership.