The focus of this thesis is the substantiation of theoretical and methodological foundations and applied provisions of improving the quality of tourist agencies, which are an important component of the tourism industry entities overall management system.
The article summarizes the theoretical basis of the products quality essence as an economic category, which reflects the totality of products (processes or services) characteristics and determines the extent of their suitability for satisfaction of human needs according to their design, deepens the concept of “tourism services quality”, offers a classification criteria for the “tourism service” category and elucidates its characteristics as an important component of the tourism product composition. It is proven that the quality acts not only as a tourism service characteristics totality, but also sets it apart from other similar offerings on the market.
Proceeding from the international experience and analysis of scientific and theoretical approaches to the improvement of the tourism services quality and definition of assessment methods, the author establish their generic classification, which is based on a number of such essential features as the way of obtaining information about the services quality, choice of sources of information about the assessed object and indicators system, etc. It was determined that assessment of the quality of individual components of a tourism service plays an important role in the quality management system. The thesis proves that the quality management integrates all the basic functions of administrative activity as such, therefore, its methodology can be viewed as a set of components in assessment and improvement of the services quality. Taking into account the principal models of the services quality management offered by foreign and domestic researchers, the work argues and identifies the most important components of the author’s own model of the tourist company services quality, which are based on three components: the quality of the tourism product, quality of service processes and quality of management functions in the company.
It was established that the main orientation of the tourism industry enterprises is the fact that their activities are focused on continuous adaptation and improvement of the modern methods for evaluating and improving the services quality, forming the models of quality management and implementing the international and national standards of quality management to ensure the tourism enterprises cost-effective operation. Formed were a system of indicators and methodological toolset for assessment of a tourism enterprise services quality subject to the availability of their individual components. Based on the considered algorithm of the integrated taxonomy, a comparative analysis of the tourism products quality of ten tourist companies of Odessa was made. The author proposes a method of evaluating and improving the quality of tourist companies based on their level comparison with the national and international standards and service quality indicators of the leaders of the organized tourism market. It is proved that after the analysis of the tourism services quality compliance with the requirements of the national and international standards, it is expedient for the tourism companies to carry out their comparative assessment with the quality of similar services provided by the market leaders. To define the measures for the services quality improvement, the best basis can be the results of a study by the benchmarking methods. The approbation of the results of the study showed that with the aim of improving the quality of the tourism product of the analysed company it is possible to generate actions aimed at improving the services quality.
Justified were the systemic and structural aspects of forming and implementing the organization and economic mechanism of the quality service concept and activities aimed at improving the quality of services provided by tourism company "04", which are built on the principles of the process approach: quality of the tourism product –quality of the customer service – quality of the management functions.
Developed was a process-oriented model of the quality management system formation, which allows considering the above-mentioned system of the tourism services quality management as a set of management actions belonging to various business processes in the activities of a tourist company and have the greatest impact on the quality of services through appropriate methods of their evaluation regarding further quality improvements. It was determined that the modern management and modeling of the companies’ business processes, and the speed and quality of customer service require a specialized software product introduction, which is developed exclusively for the needs of the tourism industry.
