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Purpose – This study aims to establish customer service factors for wellness tourism from both service providers and customer perspectives, and to determine whether gender and age factors affect older tourist opinions of customer service. Design/methodology/approach – The authors interviewed 13 experts in the hot spring hotel industry and more than 469 hot spring hotel visitors who are over 50 years of age. Content validity and homogeneity reliability as proposed by Aiken were used to confirm customer service factors. This study uses the verbal-linguistic evaluation to assess customer service factors and each service item associated with these factors. Findings – Eight crucial customer service factors, from high to low, are personnel services, environments, healthy diet, relaxation, health promotion treatments, experience of unique tourism resources, social activities, and mental learning. Research limitations/implications – This study implicated allocation and management of input resources as the service factors that are used for determining the preferences of older consumers in wellness tourism. Originality/value – Numerous countries are currently facing an aging population and market opportunities for wellness tourism are popular with the tourism industry. Studies show that enhanced customer service increases competitive advantage in the tourism industry. However, customer service differs from what customers prefer. For this study, the authors compiled the viewpoints of older consumers, hotel personnel, and expert opinions in the hotel industry to identify customer-service factors in wellness tourism. The analytical results of this study suggest that hot spring hotels in Taiwan can focus on critical customer-service items, resource management, and resource allocation.

This study involved establishing a lifestyle scale that addresses wellness tourism. Seventy-five items were collected and scored by experts; subsequently, 50 items were incorporated in the question bank for composing a questionnaire. The surveyed tourists returned 1,506 valid questionnaires. Finally, by using factor analyses, 26 items and 7 factors were extracted to design a wellness lifestyle scale; the conceptual framework for a wellness lifestyle was then constructed for local tourists in Taiwan. Future researchers of market segmentation in wellness tourism can conduct validation based on the proposed scale, screening potential customers in the wellness tourism market.

This study aimed to investigate the influence of the service encounter expectations of senior customers during wellness tours on customer satisfaction. The organizational attributes of hotels, organizational characteristics and employee characteristics, were adopted as mediating variables. A total of 346 valid questionnaires were retrieved from 50 year-old and above seniors in Taiwan. The results showed that the service encounter expectations of seniors had an indirect influence on customer satisfaction and the organizational attributes mediated the service encounter expectations of seniors and customer satisfaction. The moment of truth in the interactions between service staff members and seniors represents the pivotal management implication of this study.

Abstract:Compared with previous studies that have focused on customers' behavioral intentions or the factors that influence purchase behaviors on blogs or discussion boards, in this study, we examine the factors of independent food blogs or discussion boards that influence users' customer citizenship behaviors. Six food blogs were selected based on the flow rate and food diaries. 323 Subjects were chosen from the blog user population and then interviewed to develop the data needed for this study. The results indicate that psychological needs, customer satisfaction, and customer-company identification positively affect customer citizenship behaviors. High satisfaction of customer-orientation is a critical management strategy on food blogs. This study adapts physically existing organizational behavior theory through appropriate inference and modification for virtual community. Unlike past studies that focused on customer purchase intention, this study emphasizes customer value and social media of the virtual community.