Determining improvement priorities of public leisure facilities by revised Importance–Performance Analysis

The aim of this research is to use a revised Importance–Performance Analysis (IPA) approach that comprises three-factor theory concept and partial correlation analysis for classifying public leisure services into factors so that managers can make better decisions about how resources should be allocated to improve service quality. On the basis of the customer survey of 90,746 respondents collected from 254 public leisure centres in England during the period of 2006-2008, the research findings demonstrate that the performance of English public leisure facilities in technical quality (facility and service quality) is generally worse than functional quality (accessibility and staff). Specifically, adequate resources have to be allocated to improve the service in water temperature and number of people in swimming pool, not only because they are the major weaknesses but also because customers regard them as prerequisites. To sum up, managers need to know which factor service attributes fall so as to set right priorities while managing customer satisfaction.