The importance-performance grid is a marketing instrument used to make decisions regarding the growth of the consumers’ satisfaction, by optimizing the attributes of products. This grid is a useful instrument, as it is shown in the paper, to the extent to which the importance and performance of the attributes are correctly recorded. Another idea underlined in the paper is that regarding the difficulty to directly determine the importance of attributes or in the same stage with the determination of the service performance, according to these attributes.

The objectives of this paper are to analyze the importance-performance grid (suggested by Martilla and amended by Abalo),through an empirical study in the field of tourist services used and to test the conditions to carry out this grid taking into account the hypothetical case of indirectly determining the importance of the quality attributes.

The literature in the field regarding the importance-performance analysis is analysed and the subsequent amendments to the previous grid suggested by Martilla and James in 1977.

The present paper is a continuation of several studies on the same subject, in which the following research methods were used: direct survey by questionnaire, the Spearman correlation coefficient, and the entropy calculus. A comparative analysis of the importance-performance grid if directly recording the importance of attributes (through survey by questionnaire) and of the indirect determination of the importance of the attributes (through the Spearman coefficient and entropy calculus) is being suggested. The results indicate possible uses of methods, yet it raises a series of collateral problems regarding their application.

The contribution of this paper is given by the suggestion of two methods to indirectly determine the importance of attributes, which take into account the data measurement scale used and the collinearity among attributes and which lead to pertinent results when we use the IPA grid amended by Abalo as a decision instrument