HISTOQUAL: The development of a historic houses assessment scale

Abstract

Since the success of heritage attractions is dependent upon the quality of the visitor's experience, it is imperative for attractions providers to understand how the elements of their service delivery are evaluated by visitors. The services marketing literature has established that service quality is a pivotal factor in company success and repeat purchases. However, service quality issues appear to have received limited attention in the heritage field. The present paper sustains that heritage sites need to develop instruments to measure service quality in order to provide managers with a tool allowing them to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their service provision. The research identifies that the SERVQUAL scale can be a useful tool to measure service quality but recognises that it needs to be adapted in order to suit better new services' contexts and identifies a new scale, namely HISTOQUAL, which evaluates service quality provided in historic houses.