Service quality at selected health and fitness centres in townships in the greater Durban area

Abstract

The increasing interest in people’s wellbeing has seen the growth of health and fitness centres (HFC) all across South Africa. It has been a decade since Virgin Active and Planet Fitness expanded their business into townships, with this endeavour resulting in the opening of HFC in Khayelitsha and Soweto.

The motivation behind this study is therefore to examine the effect of service quality on customer satisfaction in the HFC industry in Ntuzuma, Umlazi, Kwa-Mashu, Clermont, and Phoenix, all townships in the greater Durban Area. Thus, the main purpose of this research is to ascertain service quality at selected HFC in townships within the greater Durban area.

Interest in service quality has grown over the last decade due to increasing competition, which has led managers to finding ways of improving profitability. One area of interest is service quality and how it affects customer satisfaction and its impact on the bottom line, which is why ascertaining service quality at selected HFC in the greater Durban area’s townships is significant.

The study was descriptive, quantitative and cross-sectional in nature, probing the effect of service quality on clients’ customer satisfaction. From these findings the Health and Fitness Centres can identify more specifically the failures in its service quality and seek to improve upon them. Service quality dimensions that are deemed to be good predictors of service quality for members of the HFCs offering have been related to factors such as the “Tangibility”, Reliability”, “Responsiveness”, “Assurance” and “Empathy. It is hoped that the results obtained will aid to support these centres in adopting practical customer service quality measures that will assist them to succeed in the highly competitive health and fitness industry.