The Service Design Strategy of Hot Spring Industry in Taiwan

Service design is an important issue in service innovation. Service concept was mistakenly discussed in a way like service design in several recent papers. However, service concept is only a narrow description of service design. After literature review, this study presents a new framework for service design as a means and end tool for modeling, designing, and developing the new services. Hot spring industry in Taiwan has been developed for a long time, and the revenue derived from the hot spring industry in 2008 was NT 63 billion. Due to its great contribution to Taiwan economy, design of hot spring service is an important issue for academia, industry and government. Today, aside from accommodation, hot spring service has been diversified to include SPA, food, cosmetics and health services, etc. Given the increasing service diversification, it is necessary to develop a knowledge system for the hot spring service design. This paper tries to structure a framework on hot spring service design, and the main research questions include: 1. What are the important dimensions and components of hot spring service design? 2. What are the priorities of the components in each dimension of service design? This paper applies analytic hierarchy process method and utilizes judgments made by experienced managers of the hot spring industry to evaluate hot spring service design. Our results indicate the priorities of service design components by experienced managers. We also discuss the difference between our finding and real practice of service design and the managerial implications for hot spring industry.