Restaurants and hotels fall short on satisfying tourists

VISITORS to Singapore were far less satisfied with its food and tourism offerings in 2014 than they were a year earlier. And if businesses want to figure out how to stem the slide in satisfaction, they could do worse than look to the factors their foreign customers prize most about their experiences here, says the Institute of Service Excellence at the Singapore Management University (ISES).

The institute's splicing of data collected from a survey of 4,850 locals and 3,750 tourists on the food & beverage and tourism sectors found that tourists were significantly unhappier than they had been a year ago. And their dissatisfaction led to significant drops in the two sectors' Customer Satisfaction Index of Singapore scores.

Tourists are typically more satisfied than locals are, and 2014 was no exception. The tourist satisfaction scores for the F&B and tourism sectors, at 71.1 and 72.5, still surpassed the locals' 67.2 point score for both sectors by a wide margin.