AbstractsIntroductionWith the number of tourists coming to Taiwan growing by 10–20 % since 2010, the number has increased due to an increasing number of foreign tourists, particularly after deregulation allowed admitting tourist groups, followed later on by foreign individual tourists, from mainland China. The purpose of this study is to propose a revised gap model to evaluate and improve service quality in Taiwanese hotel industry. Thus, service quality could be clearly measured through gap analysis, which was more effective for offering direction in developing and improving service quality.Case descriptionThe HOLSERV instrument was used to identify and analyze service gaps from the perceptions of internal and external customers. The sample for this study included three main categories of respondents: tourists, employees, and managers.Discussion and evaluationThe results show that five gaps influenced tourists’ evaluations of service quality. In particular, the study revealed that Gap 1 (management perceptions vs. customer expectations) and Gap 9 (service provider perceptions of management perceptions vs. service delivery) were more critical than the others in affecting perceived service quality, making service delivery the main area of improvement.ConclusionThis study contributes toward an evaluation of the service quality of the Taiwanese hotel industry from the perspectives of customers, service providers, and managers, which is considerably valuable for hotel managers. It was the aim of this study to explore all of these together in order to better understand the possible gaps in the hotel industry in Taiwan.

Customer satisfaction is the key factor for successful and depends highly on the behaviors of frontline service providers. Customers should be managed as assets, and that customers vary in their needs, preferences, and buying behavior. This study applied the Taiwan Customer Satisfaction Index model to a tourism factory to analyze customer satisfaction and loyalty. We surveyed 242 customers served by one tourism factory organizations in Taiwan. A partial least squares was performed to analyze and test the theoretical model. The results show that perceived quality had the greatest influence on the customer satisfaction for satisfied and dissatisfied customers. In addition, in terms of customer loyalty, the customer satisfaction is more important than image for satisfied and dissatisfied customers. The contribution of this paper is to propose two satisfaction levels of CSI models for analyzing customer satisfaction and loyalty, thereby helping tourism factory managers improve customer satisfaction effectively. Compared with traditional techniques, we believe that our method is more appropriate for making decisions about allocating resources and for assisting managers in establishing appropriate priorities in customer satisfaction management.

Chemical solutions consisting of NiO/ZnO p–n heterojunction nanowires (NWs) decorated with Pd nanoparticles on a glass substrate were used to fabricate an ultraviolet (UV)/visible photodetector. The photodetector was composed of ZnO hexagonal wurtzite and NiO cubic crystalline structures. A few NiO nanograins were found to epitaxially grow on the ZnO NW surface. The current–voltage curve for the photodetector exhibited rectification in the dark and under green and blue light-emitting diode (LED) illumination, whereas an approximately linear current–voltage curve was found under UV LED illumination. The I green/I dark, I blue/I dark, and I UV/I dark ratios for the photodetector were 91.4, 403.2, and 1.25 × 105, respectively. Multilayer structures of the photodetector are sensitive toward the UV and visible bands.