For hotel service management, standardization and personalization are a pair of eternal themes. No matter from the historical process or logical process of hotel service, personalized service is based on standardization, and standardized service is based on personalization. Only when we have a scientific understanding and grasp of hotel service standardization can we talk about the production and management of personalized service from the perspective of industrial supply, and also seek the balanced development of hotel service standardization and personalization, thus promoting the innovation of tourist hotel management, especially the theory and practice of hotel service management. In this sense, the research on the connotation, evolution law and development trend of hotel service standardization has a basic theoretical position in tourism science, especially in tourism enterprise management science.

I. Economic Interpretation of Standards and Standardization

Standard is a unified regulation of repetitive things and concepts. It is based on the comprehensive achievements of scientific and technological practical experience, approved by the competent department through consultation, and released in a specific form as a criterion and basis to follow. (Wei Xiaoan, 1998) and hotel service standardization refers to the standardized management system, unified technical standards, design and training for the work items, procedures and predetermined goals of hotel entrepreneurs and managers under the guidance of standard consciousness, so as to provide unified, traceable and verifiable repetitive services for the consumers of hotel products.

The first function of hotel service standardization is to reduce the asymmetry of quality information between supply and demand sides. Hotel service generally belongs to the category of tourism products, and one of the basic characteristics of tourism products is that consumers tend to producers in the circulation process: tourists can only complete the consumption process when they arrive at the tourist destination. (Dai Bin&Du Jiang, 1997) The consumption tension caused by the remoteness of tourism consumption will require hotel services to provide a predictable sense of security as compensation, which is also the inherent requirement of the psychological balance mechanism of tourism. (Dai Bin, 1998) When you leave your usual residence to travel to another place, you always want to have considerable expectations for the hotel's hotel projects and service quality before you leave. In the pre-standardization period, because consumers can't check the hotel service quality physically and chemically before buying or using it, most tourists know less about the hotel service quality than suppliers. Only when the hotel industry enters the standardization period can tourists make informed expectations on the quality of the hotel products they consume through external signs such as "star rating" and "franchise" and the standards of relevant countries, industries and enterprises. Even if consumers feel that their legitimate rights and interests have been violated, they can apply for judicial relief according to relevant standards. Therefore, hotel service standardization can maximize the symmetrical distribution of service quality information among tourism actors.

The second function of hotel service standardization is to promote the market competition between manufacturers to change from initial price competition to higher level non-price competition. Standardization means reducing the differences between hotel products. In the extreme sense, standardization will lead to no difference between products. And the difference of products is a necessary prerequisite for the formation of a completely competitive market. In a nearly completely competitive market, it is impossible for any manufacturer of tourism products to have monopoly profits. Therefore, driven by the motivation of profit maximization, hotels either try their best to expand production scale, or provide higher quality products and services to the market, or "create differences" through system and management innovations such as branding and collectivization. In either case, the market will be upgraded from low-level price competition to non-price competition with quality, brand and management mode as the core.

Hotel service standardization can also promote the optimization and change of industrial structure. The inevitable result of standardized production is the expansion of industrial scale and the decline of service price, so more and more tourists can consume high-quality and predictable hotel services; On the other hand, standardization also makes hotel products tend to be indistinguishable and industry profits tend to be average, which provides the most direct impetus for the development of hotel personalized service. Under the market pressure of seeking service characteristics and maintaining competitive advantage, the market segmentation of tourism accommodation products will become more and more detailed. From the perspective of industrial structure, standardization promotes the concentration of hotel product suppliers, and large hotels and hotel groups occupy a dominant position in the market. Individualization, on the other hand, has left an effective growth space for small hotels with different characteristics, so that they can rely on personalized service to counter the pressure of collectivization. As a result, the tendency of centralization and decentralization of industrial structure coexist, and the choice of tourist accommodation products has become larger.

In a word, service standardization is the basic element to promote the system innovation of tourism and tourism enterprises, and it is also a powerful tool to increase tourists' expected utility of products.

Second, research on the development process of service standardization.

Standardized service is a successful imitation of the large-scale production mode of "using machines to produce machines" in industrial society by tourism and hotel industry. In the field of industrial production, Ford-style assembly line production mode characterized by standardization and programming has brought revolutionary changes to product production in industrial society; With the increase of output multiple, the controllability of quality is greatly enhanced. Another result of this mode of production is the "homogeneity" or "indifference" of products. Because only homogenization can realize large-scale production and make up for the cost of machine input through scale effect. However, this homogenization is based on consumer acceptance, that is to say, only when the effective demand of the market is large enough, it is necessary to adopt mechanized mass production to form standardized effective supply. If there is only one effective demand for Ford in the market, Ford may choose a highly personalized manual production method instead of an assembly line.

In the era of mass tourism, the relative stability of the demand of many tourists, as well as the standardization of manufacturing industry and the technological and management innovation of programmed production methods, make the service standardization of hotel industry necessary and feasible. Only in the field of hotel service, the first "machine" produced in a roundabout way is a standardized management model-because employee behavior itself constitutes a part of hotel service products, hotel entrepreneurs try to achieve service standardization by standardizing employee behavior. The management mode here includes the management theory of hotel entrepreneurs, the organizational form and operation mechanism of semi-militarized hotels, standardized facilities and equipment configuration, and the work design of service posts with obvious Taylor-style action characteristics (service items, operation processes, inspection standards) and so on. Standardized hotel services are "produced" through this invisible "machine".

In this process, the demand orientation of tourists is the first driving force of hotel service standardization. When a tourist leaves his permanent residence for whatever reason, he will face an uncertain natural and human environment. Due to the characteristics of long-distance and immovability of hotel service and the simultaneity of production and consumption, the quality of hotel service cannot be detected in advance by conventional physical and chemical means. Therefore, in the non-standardized hotel service market, tourists are always faced with the uncertainty of hotel service quality and the possibility of price discrimination for different tourists by hotel companies, which leads to unpredictable tourism effects. Once the standardization of hotel service items and operating procedures exists in the market, tourists' expectations of hotel quality and their own utility will become relatively certain. When booking a three-star city hotel to join a well-known hotel group in a different place, tourists will have relatively certain expectations on the specifications, quality and price of the hotel services they will consume according to relevant national standards, industry standards and enterprise standards. If the result is not in line with the expectation, it is easy for tourists to determine the reasons, so as to take corresponding internal complaints, apply for arbitration, judicial relief, and give up voting in their own currency to protect the legitimate rights and interests of consumers. It is for this reason that tourists have an increasing demand for hotel service standardization.

Under the condition of market economy, the demand of consumers only constitutes the supporting force of market changes. To become a reality, there must be manufacturers-the hotel service market is driven by hotel enterprises. Profit maximization-oriented enterprises are willing to promote service standardization mainly for the following reasons. First of all, the core of hotel service products exists in the form of employees' living labor, that is, human behavior constitutes an important part of service products. This also means that in the production process of hotel service products, the degree of substitution of machines for people and the materialization level of products are relatively low. (Dai Bin, 1998) In a market dominated by division of labor and specialization, the adoption of machines and the materialization of products are extremely important driving forces for enterprise management efficiency. Therefore, hotel enterprises will strive to replace the "machine" in the production of service products through the norms and standards of service items and service processes. At first, these standards may appear in excellent hotels in the form of enterprise standards, but before the government intervened, with the success of these standardized production enterprises in the market, their enterprise standards became de facto standards and could bring monopoly profits to hotel enterprises in a certain period of time. Secondly, for manufacturers who are new to and ready to enter the hotel industry, the development of standardization movement is conducive to reducing barriers to entry. Standardization means that there is basically no difference or little difference in the same level of services provided by different hotels. No difference means that the non-capital barriers in the hotel market are reduced and the market becomes more open. Standardized or slightly different hotel services are also conducive to creating a market that is close to perfect competition. In this market, all hotel enterprises are facing a horizontal demand curve and can only get normal profits from capital. No hotel can take advantage of product/service differences to maintain a long-term monopoly. (See Dai Bin, 1999) Thirdly, the standardization of hotel services is also conducive to the market expansion of enterprises. Because standardization can increase tourists' expectations of product quality certainty and tourism utility, hotels that implement standardized supply can easily occupy more market share and expand to further markets. At the same time, the mature standardized hotel service and management model can also be used as production factors to participate in the residual distribution of hotel enterprises through management contracts and franchising. Fourthly, hotel service standardization can reduce the cost of human resources including staff training. With the acceleration of industrialization and the rising value of human resources, the cost of human resources, including the hotel industry, will also increase accordingly, and the high staff turnover rate in developed tourism countries is also stimulating the increase of training costs. Under the action of the law of scale economy, the procedural and organized training mode suitable for standardized services will effectively reduce the training cost. All these reasons related to standardization are ultimately conducive to the realization of the goal of maximizing the profits of hotel enterprises and promoting more hotel enterprises to participate in the process of hotel service standardization.

The third change subject in the process of hotel service standardization is the government, which is represented by tourism administrative departments and industry associations in reality. The main purposes of government participation and promotion of hotel service standards are as follows. First, regulate the market. Through standardization, the information asymmetry between hotels, between hotels and travel agencies, and between hotels and tourists can be reduced, thus standardizing the hotel market order and business behavior of enterprises, especially promoting the market competition among hotel manufacturers to shift from low-level price competition to high-level non-price competition with quality, brand and scale as the core. At the same time, it is also an inevitable choice for tourism administrative departments to adapt to the inherent requirements of market economy and manage market behavior by market means to strengthen the management level of the industry. Second, promote the development of tourism industrialization. Standardization promotes the expansion of tourism market from both demand and supply, and promotes the development of tourism industrialization through division of labor and specialization. Third, improve the overall competitiveness of national hotel industry. Today, with the internationalization of domestic market competition and international market competition, tourism administrative departments try to strengthen market access management on the one hand and improve the overall management level and core competitiveness of national hotel industry on the other. Fourthly, in reality, the tourism administration department of the government may have the motivation to seek a greater "rent-seeking" basis for its management right. In fact, governments around the world have done a lot of work on the management standards of tourism. China has also established the world's first "National Tourism Standardization Technical Committee" for the whole tourism standardization work. (Wei Xiaoan, 1998) By promoting the standardization of the hotel industry, the government's tourism administration department objectively promotes the development level of the entire hotel industry, and on the other hand, it can maximize the government's revenue.

Through market mechanism and government intervention, the above three forces make hotel services evolve along the track of "emotional service-experience service-standardized service-personalized service".

Third, analysis of the development trend of hotel service standardization

The so-called trend refers to the general trend of something in the future, and the analysis of the trend is based on the scientific grasp of the historical process and logical process. Since we say that the standardization of hotel service is a successful imitation of the mass production mode of machines in the manufacturing field, the changing law of its origin field may be a powerful basis for us to predict the development trend of hotel service standardization. At the same time, the changes of tourism consumption pattern, hotel service supply structure and its influencing factors also have a decisive impact on the evolution of hotel service standardization.

Theoretically, there may be two extremes in the development trend of hotel service standardization: complete standardization and complete personalization. Complete standardization means that all services and procedures provided by hotels to tourists are produced in full accordance with standards (international standards, national standards and industry standards). A more extreme example is the "unmanned hotel" which is completely provided by machinery and equipment, that is, all the services needed for tourism are completely provided by machinery and equipment based on information technology in the store. As a result, the price of hotel products and the overall welfare of tourists will drop at the same time. The reduction of price is the inevitable result of economies of scale, and the decline of tourists' total welfare is related to the decrease of the diversity of hotel products available. According to the law of diminishing marginal utility, consumers would rather invest more money in different kinds of products and services than consume the same products and services as others. In addition, tourists' psychological needs for hotels, such as warmth, respect and socialization, cannot be repeated and traced back, so there is no way to carry out standardized production. Completely personalized means that the hotel provides completely personalized service items and service methods according to every demand of every visitor. In this way, the production cost of the hotel is too high to operate-personalization will lead to the loss of the internal foundation of the law of scale economy, and the hotel owners will not be able to maximize profits; Or tourist hotels discriminate against consumers once, twice or even three times, completely robbing tourists of their consumption surplus, leading to market shrinkage or even disappearance. (stigler, 1987) So these two extreme cases are only theoretical assumptions, which cannot be realized in the process of hotel service standardization. In other words, in the production of service products, employees' behavior itself constitutes a part of the product, and in the process of service consumption, there is an instant dynamic relationship between consumers and producers-the service behavior of hotel employees will have an impact on the psychology of tourists, and the consumption behavior of tourists will also have an impact on the further behavior of hotel employees, so the machine replacement rate of modern hotel industry is naturally lower than that of manufacturing industry. The standardization of products is a function of machine production, that is, the higher the substitution rate of machines for people, the higher the standardization of products, so the standardization of hotel services is bound to be lower than that of industrial products.

Attached drawings (drawings)

The lower part of the chart is the influencing factor area of hotel service standardization, the middle circular part is the factor action area, and the upper part is the standardization evolution area.

Schematic diagram of logical flow of hotel service standardization (@ ① Dai Bin, Anhui University of Finance and Trade, 1999)

In the foreseeable future, the main factors affecting the development trend of hotel service standardization are as follows:

1. The influence of changes in tourists' consumption patterns. It is manifested in the pursuit of individuality and ecological orientation by tourists in the process of consuming hotel products. Personalized orientation means that consumers set the distance between themselves and people and things outside according to their own desires, cherish the distance interval, but divide things to create an adult life. This kind of indifference to other people's ideas and choosing the consumption mode that suits you will make the future tourism consumption more rational and intelligent. The theme of ecological orientation is to express consumers' concern for the environment, nature and society through targeted selection of hotel services. They are beginning to realize that their consumption needs can not be met to the greatest extent by blindly demanding and squandering the environment and society, and consumers need to strike a balance between demand levels and pros and cons.

2. The influence of information technology. Computer network technology has revolutionized the time and cost of information dissemination, enabling hotel managers to grasp the personalized demand information of tourists in real time and provide personalized services accordingly. Before the emergence of network technology, the process of tourists' demand satisfaction had to go through a long circulation link of "travel agency-retailer-wholesaler, designing and producing service products-tour groups-reception agencies-tourists", and the responsibility between tourists and tourism production enterprises was clear (tourists are consumers, travel agencies and tourist hotels are producers). Due to the high cost of information, the profit maximization goal of tourism manufacturers can only be achieved through economies of scale. Reflected in the service is basically the homogenization of tourists' needs and the implementation of standardized services. It can also be said that during this period, the supply and demand sides are "inaction, inaction" for service personalization. The it revolution represented by interner has greatly reduced the time and cost of information transmission between tourists and tourism manufacturers, and the relationship between demand generation and tourism service satisfaction has been greatly reduced. Its extreme example is "tourists put forward their needs (through the network)-tourism manufacturers design and provide corresponding services-tourists' evaluation". In this way, the personalization of tourism services has become a problem of "paying equal attention to ability and behavior" among tourism subjects, or an inevitable trend. If the transmission time and cost of consumer demand information from tourists to hotel manufacturers are low enough, it will become a reality to provide corresponding vip for consumers of every hotel product, or to promote vip services. In fact, the wide application of hotel reservation system has already indicated the arrival of this consumption era. In this sense, the personalization of tourism services, including hotel services, is based on the directness of its services.

3. The influence of the development trend of hotel groups. In the buyer's market situation, fierce competition urges tourism manufacturers to constantly innovate their service products, while standardized production processes will only enhance the homogenization of hotel products and expand the overall market scale, but will not expand the market share of a specific hotel enterprise. Therefore, the major hotel groups with innovative consciousness and ability have sought their own product features through personalized service, forming a "selling point" in the market, thus maintaining their competitive advantage. The demonstration effect and competitive pressure brought by the hotel group's own market advantage will promote more hotel enterprises to join the ranks of personalized service.

Realistically speaking, the overall development trend of hotel product standards in the future: based on international hotel industry practices, national standards and industry standards, seeking development with enterprise standards and seeking innovation with personalized service. Specifically, in the coming period, the standardization process of hotel product production will present the following characteristics.

1. Market segmentation and business globalization coexist. More and more hotel groups turn their attention to the global tourism and leisure market, design corresponding personalized products for one or several target markets, give full play to the development strategy of "small is big", and exchange network scale for market space. Today, under the guidance of the concept of personalized consumption, the market segment capacity of a country or region is very small, and adding up the global specific target market will be a very large number. Through these accumulated marketing activities in the target market, enterprises can continue to maintain large-scale operation. This trend will further promote the expansion of hotel groups, and the merger and strategic alliance between hotel enterprises will show an accelerated development trend.

2. On the basis of market segmentation, more and more hotels, especially those large hotel groups, may adopt the competitive strategy of "personalized service items and standardized service processes" to meet the needs of tourists at different levels. Hotel enterprises will also devote themselves to the construction of enterprise standard brands to increase the differentiation of enterprises and product brands in the tourism market.

3. The combination of high technology and high culture. With the development of the times, more and more modern scientific and technological achievements will be introduced into the hotel industry, such as satellite TV, network interface, intelligent room system, virtual entertainment and so on. , leading to a high degree of technology in the service process. However, the inherent cultural characteristics of tourism consumption will require hotel enterprises to emphasize the organic integration of high technology and culture when providing personalized services. After all, the warmth, respect, communication and other feelings generated by the interaction between people can't be obtained by tourists who leave home temporarily from pure technology.

4. Hardware standardization and personalized service. The service mode will change from the past block service to the "package service"-that is, in the past, customers bought products separately, but now this kind of purchase will be realized by the service agent. This service form has been implemented in travel agencies in the past, only for vip guests and some group activities of hotels. The future trend is that this service form will be implemented for individual customers and any group activities (including meetings and tour groups). This is also the most successful service model of the international hotel industry: for example, the "golden key" system, personal service and whole-process agency service implemented by some hotels have all been proved to be good ways to embody the basic principle of "convenience and efficiency" in service.

At present and in the future, the development direction of China tourist hotel services should be based on standardization, supplemented by personalization. This is because domestic tourists are the main consumption support force of China's tourist hotel industry-in this sense, "taking a break from busy work and settling down first" is correct. Under the restriction of real consumption power, most domestic tourists are sensitive person, or the price demand elasticity of hotel products is relatively large. The implementation of standardized tourism service strategy in tourist hotels can expand the market on a large scale, reduce the average cost and attract more consumers. Personalized service is mainly used in the service project design of specific market segments to support the brand strategy of enterprises. Standardization and personalization are an interactive process. As long as the demand of tourists, the internal resource structure and strategic objectives of enterprises change, standardized services will inevitably face innovation. That is, to provide personalized services for tourists in certain target markets. After the personalized service project matures, it must be solidified in the form of system through standardized service processes and service standards.