HISTOQUAL: The development of a historic houses assessment scale

Since the success of heritage attractions is dependent upon the quality of the visitor's experience, it is imperative for attractions providers to und erstand how the elements of their service delivery are evaluated by visitor s. The services marketing literature has established that service quality i s a pivotal factor in company success and repeat purchases. However, servic e quality issues appear to have received limited attention in the heritage field. The present paper sustains that heritage sites need to develop instr uments to measure service quality in order to provide managers with a tool allowing them to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their service pro vision. The research identifies that the SERVQUAL scale can be a useful too l 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, nam ely HISTOQUAL, which evaluates service quality provided in historic houses. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.