A study on holistic customer experience in China’s related hotel and resorts

Abstract

Resort hotels have sprung up all over China in recent years providing customers with pleasurable and memorable experiences. The challenge to creating these consumer experiences is the proper identification of specific characteristics that influence experiences and gaining better understanding of how these experiences impact customers’ perceptions, emotions and behavior. To this end, this study intends to develop a model that identifies antecedents and consequences of consumer experiences in Chinese resort hotels. To facilitate this research objective, a model was presented which propose that advertising efforts and service performance of resort hotels are antecedents of consumer experiences whereas customers’ perceived value, consumption emotions, satisfaction and behavioral intentions are its consequences. This proposed holistic model of customer experience includes 11 hypotheses and is based on Stimulus – Organism – Response (S-O-R) model, Information Theory and Services Theatre Model. A scale was also developed to operationalize the construct of service performance. To initiate this research, a survey approach was taken. A total of 1570 questionnaires were distributed within 11 resort hotels across 5 cities in China and 900 of them were returned back. Partial least squares based structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was used to analyse the collected data. Overall, the results indicated that the proposed holistic model of customer experience is a parsimonious model with good predictive ability. The results also show that collected data fits the proposed model well with a support for all the 11 proposed hypotheses. Given that the experience of customers at resort hotel plays a significant role in affecting their emotions, perceptions and behavior, resort hotels need not only to put efforts into improving their service performance and advertising efforts, but also to understand and carefully manage the overall resort hotel experience. Overall, this study proposed and tested a holistic model of customer experience which does not only have a theoretical significance but also enhances understanding of customer experiences in resort hotels, their antecedents and consequences.