Every student takes over an 80-room independent on Marlin Bay’s resort coast — names it, then staffs, prices, and runs it for four seasonal quarters against four rival properties on the same strip. The product isn’t a thing in a box; it’s what happens at the front desk.
Maps to your syllabus
Goods marketing has four Ps; services has seven. A room-night unsold tonight is gone — capacity is a use-it-or-lose-it 7,200 room-nights a quarter — and the product is produced and consumed in the same moment, by people. Students don’t learn that from the textbook chapter; they learn it by watching Gap 3 widen the quarter they understaffed the summer peak.
Learning outcomes
Diagnose the five SERVQUAL gaps
Knowledge, standards, delivery, communication, perception — each gap is invisible until the right research reveals it.
Run the Service-Profit Chain
Internal investment → employee morale → service quality → guest satisfaction → loyalty → profit. Skip a link and the chain breaks.
Price a perishable product
Three room classes, seasonal demand, yield management — a room-night unsold tonight earns $0 forever.
Turn failures into loyalty
Failures are inevitable; empowerment is a line item. Recovered well, a failure can leave a guest more loyal than if nothing had gone wrong.
Each quarter asks the same seven-P decisions — rates, room mix, channels, promotion, staffing, standards, servicescape. What changes is the season: demand swings from a ×0.85 winter lull to a ×1.20 summer peak, and what carries over — loyalty seeded early, employees kept happy, gaps closed — decides who owns the peak when it arrives.
The Groundwork
Post-holiday lull — the lobby is quiet enough to hear the radiator. Set staffing, wages, positioning, and standards, and buy the Customer Expectations Audit. Every other investment is guesswork without it.
Case study this quarter
Ritz-Carlton · service standards, engineered not wished
The Last Quiet Quarter
First results are in. Tune ADR, fix the room mix, buy the Mystery Shopper if Gap 3 or 4 looks wide. Spring travel returns — this is the last chance to fix process problems before peak.
Case study this quarter
Mandarin Oriental · internal marketing, the luxury service brand
The Peak
Summer surge — demand ×1.20. Push ADR to the top of segment tolerance and staff for the load: a 95%-full hotel with a lean team watches Gap 3 widen in public.
Case study this quarter
Marriott · yield management, the room that cannot be stored
The Harvest
Holiday and corporate season. Harvest the loyalty you seeded in Q1 — this quarter rewards properties whose service held up all year. Behind? Size the bet you can afford to lose; there is no Q5.
Case study this quarter
Four Seasons · the Service-Profit Chain, the economics of loyalty
Parasuraman, Zeithaml & Berry’s gap model is the spine of the course — and the sim’s diagnostic layer. Service quality never fails in general; it fails through one of five named breakdowns, and each one names the research or investment that closes it. Students stop saying “service was bad” and start saying which gap did it.
What students actually see
The gaps are taught in the briefing, bought or funded on the decision form, and reported as five scores on every results panel — so when satisfaction slips, students can locate it at a gap, not just a number.
Knowledge Gap
What management thinks guests want vs. what they actually want.
Closes via: Customer Expectations Audit
Standards Gap
Guest expectations vs. the service standards you set internally.
Closes via: Service standards (SOPs) investment
Delivery Gap
The standards you set vs. what your staff actually deliver on the floor.
Closes via: Mystery Shopper Audit · staffing, training
Communication Gap
What you promise in marketing vs. what you actually deliver.
Closes via: Mystery Shopper Audit · brand positioning
Perception Gap
Guest expectations vs. their perception of what they got — the sum of Gaps 1–4.
Closes via: NPS & review analysis
Every quarter produces a property state and a guest state you can review in the instructor dashboard. Case-study answers are submitted alongside and auto-graded against your answer key.
Positioning & service delivery
Upscale positioning, aimed at Romance & Couples. Deluxe ADR to $310. Standard staffing at above-market wages; doubling training, funding recovery empowerment. Bought the Mystery Shopper Audit — Gap 3 looked wide.
Deluxe ADR
$310
Staffing
Standard
Wages
Above mkt
What the panel surfaces
“Gap 3 narrowed to 15 — the Mystery Shopper paid for itself. NPS 36, up four. One severe failure in the deluxe wing went unrecovered at −8; empowerment is still underfunded for peak load. Employee satisfaction 73 — the chain is starting to pull.”
The fastest way to evaluate the module is to take a guided tour of Quarter 1 — same brief, same decision form, same research dashboard, same results panel your students see, prepopulated with sample inputs so you can click through and read the reveal without grading your own work. We recommend doing it before assigning.
Already adopted? Open the instructor dashboard →
Course wizard
One class code — five-property pods open automatically as students join.
Individual play
Every student names and runs their own property in a five-hotel market.
Four case studies
Ritz-Carlton, Mandarin Oriental, Marriott, Four Seasons — auto-graded against your answer key.
Canvas-ready CSV
Export the full gradebook on demand.