Search results

Hospitality firms aim to increase their profits by implementing a variety of marketing activities, including using decoy pricing to provide alternative choices for consumers. Decoys are relatively higher-priced offerings that signal lower value than the other offerings in the consideration set. The purpose of this research is to investigate the influence of decoy pricing on consumer choices across various contexts in the foodservice and hotel industries.

Across the pilot and four main studies, the current research employs a sequential exploratory mixed-method design to investigate the influence of decoy pricing in the foodservice and lodging industries. The qualitative part of this research was based on two focus groups, followed by a pilot study and four main study experiments.

The results show that decoy pricing escalates consumers’ choices of more expensive product bundles in both restaurant and hotel cancellation policy contexts. However, decoy pricing does not increase the selection of more expensive hotel product bundles.

While decoy pricing has been utilized as an effective revenue maximization strategy for product placement in retail stores, less is known about how promotional advertisements with decoy offers influence hotel and restaurant customers to choose more costly options. Specifically, this is the first study that explores whether decoy pricing and product/service bundling can encourage customers to select more expensive offers in hotel and restaurant contexts, considering the types of hospitality bundles that may limit this effect.

The purpose of this study is to investigate what people with different demographic characteristics such as age and gender expect from hotel room design and examine how design preferences affect purchase intent and desire to stay and word-of-mouth behavior.

The study was based on a quasi-experimental design conducted on 762 participants. The manipulations of room color and design style were prepared using the 3D modeling software, while age and gender were self-reported variables.

The results indicated that age and gender moderate the relationship between hotel guest satisfaction and room design style. Younger guests prefer contemporary design style, while older guests show equal satisfaction with traditional and contemporary styles. Male guests prefer rooms decorated in masculine colors, while women are equally satisfied with masculine or feminine color schemes.

This study was conducted as a hypothetical, computer-aided experimental scenario. A field experiment captured guests’ satisfaction with an experimental hotel room. A substantive cause–effect relationship between hotel room visual servicescape stimuli and satisfaction was established.

Identifying design style and color preferences of a hotel target market is paramount for investment payoff and further supports the customization of hotel services.

This is the first experimental study to manipulate color scheme and type of design in a hotel room and capture their effects on satisfaction and behavior of guests with different demographic characteristics.

A Hobson’s choice is a free choice in which only one option is offered. The aim of this study is to examine dimensions of “Hobson’s choice” servicescape and their effect on affective responses and to understand how affective responses drive consumer decisions in “true choice” and “Hobson’s choice” servicescapes.

Two studies have been conducted. The first study used mixed methods approach (focus groups and online survey) to examine dimensions of “Hobson’s choice” servicescape. The second study used a scenario-based experimental design to compare the effect of enjoyment and anxiety on consumer decisions in “true choice” and “Hobson’s choice” servicescapes.

Study 1 results indicate that hedonic and utilitarian servicescape attributes have a different effect on contrasting emotional responses. This study reveals a positive relationship between consumer enjoyment and hedonic stimuli in Hobson’s choice servicescape. Furthermore, inadequate utilitarian servicescape dimensions cause consumer anxiety. Study 2 results indicate that enjoyment plays a more important role in consumer decision-making in true choice settings, whereas anxiety is more important in Hobson’s choice settings.

Hobson’s choice settings should focus on servicescape features that reduce anxiety and thus lead to affirmative consumer decisions. On the other hand, true choice settings should try to improve consumer enjoyment to create affirmative consumer decisions.

This is the first study to examine and compare drivers of consumer’s emotions and their effect on consumer decisions in Hobson’s choice and true choice servicescapes.

The purpose of this study is to distinguish between two types of nostalgia, examine their effect on emotions and explore the relationships between nostalgic emotions evoked by past hotel experiences and consumers’ brand attachment and willingness-to-pay.

This study was based on a sequential explanatory mixed-method design. An online scenario-based experiment was complemented with online structured interviews.

The results indicate that both personal nostalgia and historical nostalgia evoke positive emotions (upbeat/elation and warm/tender). However, emotions evoked by personal nostalgia are less intense than those evoked by historical nostalgia. Positive emotions successfully predicted brand prominence and brand-self connection. Brand prominence, but not brand-self connection, was positively related to consumers’ willingness-to-pay.

The study’s findings suggest that hotel brands that focus on creating extraordinary memories, and brands with more historical themes, elicit more positive emotions among hotel customers. This, in turn, makes customers more likely to recall that hotel brand in the future and translates into higher willingness-to-pay.

This study is among the first to establish and test a conceptual model that connects nostalgia, nostalgic emotions, brand attachment and willingness-to-pay in the hotel industry context. As such, it is a rare attempt to explain the role of personal and historical nostalgia in hospitality research.

Considering the complexity of the airport industry service palette, it is important to identify which air travel factors are distractors and which factors are enhancers of passenger satisfaction. Building on Herzberg's two-factor motivation theory, this study aims to explore most frequently mentioned attributes of airport service quality and distinguish key drivers for passenger satisfaction/dissatisfaction in the airport context.

A content analysis of 1,095 traveler comments posted between 2010 and 2013 on an airport review web site was performed in order to identify satisfiers/dissatisfiers. The web spider randomly selected consumer comments related to 33 popular destinations.

The study results indicated key satisfiers in the airport context such as cleanliness and pleasant environment to spend time in. On the other side, security-check, confusing signage and poor dining offer are recognized as major dissatisfiers in the airport setting.

The study findings provide insight on predominant satisfiers, dissastisfiers and performance factors of airport service quality from passengers' perspectives. Airport management teams may use the study results to renovate airport facility and improve service quality.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study is the first to utilize the visual data mining techniques in examining airport users' experience. Visualization produced summaries of qualitative comments in the form of tag clouds, word networks, and word tree images that help discover the most emerging themes of travelers' complaints and compliments.

Hospitality firms adopted diverse hiring policies and public declarations of support for LGBTQ+ causes through brand activism. The impact of activism on LGBTQ+ employees’ workplace experiences has been ambiguous. This study aims to examine the hospitality and tourism employees’ perceptions of gay and lesbian leaders as token-hires among hospitality employees and the spillover effect on company’s motives for hiring the leaders. This study further explores LGBTQ+ employees’ reactions to token-hiring as a form of activism, and how workplace interactions as passing/revealing LGBTQ+ individuals shaped their career development.

This research adopted a sequential mixed-methods design. An experiment examines how employees judge gay vs lesbian hospitality leaders as token hires, contingent on their own gender identity. It further tests the conditional mediation of tokenism on company’s egoistic motives for activism. A qualitative study explores the reactions to token-hiring as activism from the perspective of LGBTQ+ leaders who reflect on their own careers and workplace experiences.

Tokenism in the hospitality workplace is recognized as the phenomenon attributed to groups at the intersection of identities (e.g. gay men). Findings demonstrate the spillover effect of tokenism perceptions of gay male leaders by other men on company’s egoistic motives for activism. This effect is not observed for a lesbian female leader. Results from interviews suggest that hospitality and tourism LGBTQ+ employees predominantly take the post-gay vs political approach when managing their sexual identities at work and feel ambivalent toward token-hiring as LGBTQ+ brand activism.

This research contributes to understanding workplace challenges of LGBTQ+ employees and how they are perceived by others contingent on gender identity. It also explores the role of tokenism in their experiences.