Une étude de Disney World

For this final assignment, I have chosen to do my research on Disney World. Indeed, this theme park is famous worldwide and I am so glad to visit it during my semester in Florida. With Universal Studios, this is the reference in term of theme park. Since I am here, I went to Disney World (Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, Disney Downtown and Epcot) 4 times in the space of four months. Furthermore, I work on this subject in my marketing class and some of my American friends are working in this park. This is the reason why I have chosen this company.

1) Provide examples of how the company is doing across the five attributes of service quality (i.e., RATER). You can use an overall or a "one experience" context here meaning one service encounter or a summary of many encounters.

Reliability: Disney employees offer their help to the customers. For example, if a family wants to take a picture, one of the employees comes and offers them to take this picture in order that all the family can be on this picture. The employees are managed to make each visitor unique. If visitors come to the theme park on their birthday, employees give to them a badge with their name, thus, each employee can wish a “happy birthday”.

Assurance: I am French, so I don’t have an American mobile phone and I don’t have all the time money on this. The last time I visited the park, I was getting lost, alone, without any way to contact my fiend. So I asked to one of the employees whether they could borrow me her mobile phone to contact my friends. She accepted without any hesitation. I was so relief!

Tangible: Like Universal, Disney has been created after the image of a lot of fictional characters or real people. The symbol of Disney is Mickey Mouse, and Disney Company bases it communication on this symbol, and on all the personages in the Disney Movies. The company created real shops with only Disney items. The visitors come, most of the time, for them and for coming into this singular universe. The characters and famous people are the base of the attraction of the customers. This is one of the tangible aspects of Disney World.

The second tangible aspect of this park is the setting. We saw in chapter 3 of the book “Managing quality service in hospitality” (Ford, Sturmand, Heaton), that the decor of a theme park is as important as the attractions themselves. Indeed, the setting permits to the guest to travel in another universe. A theme park provides dream and magic. The environment of the parks is important because “it influences guest expectations. It creates and maintains the mood and has positive effects on the employees.” Furthermore, Disney is associated to the dream and the magic. So the setting of the park must have to be special.

Empathy: I am always surprised to see the kindness of all Universal employees. I can’t help to imagine myself doing their job all day long: being in the middle of the crowd all the time, doing the same repetitive things. I don’t know if I would be able to do this. But each employee doesn’t miss any “Hello!! How are you doing today?”, “Do you need anything?”, “Everything is Ok?”.

Disney Company is famous for its service standards. According to the web site “Mouse Planet”, I found the Disney’s seven service guideline:

- “Make eye contact and smile”

- “Greet

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