Diagnosing whether northern Cyprus hotels are ready for TQM: an empirical analysis

Abstract

This article discusses the Total Quality Management (TQM) philosophy of performance and receptiveness in some organizations. It also argues why TQM has not been diffusing among small and medium sized labour incentive organizations and industries (SMEs) at the expected speed. In particular, SME-type hotel organizations have to cope with high labour turnover, competition, seasonality challenges and some other threats resulting from their product characteristics, which are intangible, perishable, customer involved, timely and homogeneous. Therefore, these hotels need some new, cheap, simple and logical total quality approaches more than their production-incentive counterparts. Having benchmarked both 1999's TQM readiness data with 2001's, we have explored the fact that three- and five-star hoteliers' policies and implementations in northern Cyprus are still very unfamiliar with the TQM approach.