TOURISM AND SERVICES FROM THE POINT OF VIEWOF THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

In the market economy, maintaining the competitiveness1 requires continuous creativity and innovation in order to develop more sophisticated, more refined, more individually nuanced new products and services. The creativity imposes the tourist company managers to regularly reassess the dimensions of the market segments on which they are positioned, to carefully analyse the products and services, in order to eliminate from their offers those products and services or procedures whose profitability is quickly decreasing. Unlike the product quality, service quality is more difficult to define, to judge or express in quantitative terms, as the service has few physical dimensions such as performance, operational characteristics and maintenance costs, which could be used to compare or measure. Due to the non-separable feature of the production and the consumption of services, quality should be defined both based on the process of service provision and the actual results expressed by consumer satisfaction. To obtain a differential advantage, providers should improve the quality tracking the overcoming of the consumer’s expectations in the perception of quality.