Understanding customer satisfaction through service quality in a Sri Lankan hotel

Abstract

This thesis examines the impact of service quality on customer satisfaction in a 30 year old Sri Lanka hotel based on Hilton Colombo as the case study. The research is a reaction to the intensive competitiveness in the luxury hotel industry in the country and the necessity to learn what service specificities guests value the most. I applied a quantitative and descriptive design, which required gathering 164 online guest reviews on major travel sites at the end of 2025 and analyzing them through the SERVQUAL model tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. I was given the opportunity to visualize the pattern in the form of the evaluations by coding each review on the presence and the strength of these dimensions and compare them with its overall star rating.

The results indicate that the overall guest satisfaction is clearly good portion of the visitors rated their stay as good or very good. The most prominent dimensions are reliability and assurance that imply that the guests are confident that the hotel can provide what is promised and aware of the employees as professional and skillful employees, and the tangibles are also doing well. The responsiveness and empathy are significantly lower, and it can be indicated that speed of the service and personal warmth are not always equally good as the other quality dimensions. Therefore, Hilton Colombo has a good and reliable basic service, but it should secure quick and personal contact to go beyond fulfillments into perfect experiences. I would suggest to keep protect the current advantages, enhancing handling time, enhancing the level of empathy towards the staff, and employing online reviews as a continuous management instrument.