Purpose
This paper aims to review hospitality and tourism research on customer satisfaction (CS), service quality (SQ) and customer value (CV) published in several established hospitality and tourism journals over the past 15-16 years. A parallel review of research on the same topics published in several leading marketing journals is also conducted to show comparisons in research trends across the two different, but closely related, fields of study. By doing so, this paper aims to summarize lessons learned from previous research and provide suggestions for future research on the topics in the hospitality and tourism discipline.
Design/methodology/approach
This study reviewed 242 articles appearing in six selected hospitality and tourism journals and 71 articles in four business journals that were published on CS, SQ and CV over the period of 2000-2015. A comprehensive coding scheme was developed to sort each study by more than 50 criteria.
Findings
While research on these topics has grown constantly during the period in the hospitality and tourism field, it has declined in the general business discipline over the same period. Hospitality and tourism research relied heavily on cross-sectional data through a survey approach, whereas business studies used experimental designs more frequently. Research on CS has sustained both interest and productivity, but research on SQ and CV has dwindled over time. Another notable finding is that most studies are not grounded in strong theories, although CS studies tended to be more theory-embedded.
Practical implications
This study provides many useful insights into the research practice and trends of related research and suggestions for future research, especially for hospitality and tourism researchers.
Originality/value
This study provides an unprecedented, comprehensive review of theories, methods, discussion points, implications, limitations and conclusions of studies on CS, SQ and CV published in selected hospitality and tourism journals over the past 15 years.
While customer-to-customer interactions are frequent in hospitality and tourism settings, very little research investigates the effects of other customers and other customer-generated service failures. Using the critical incident technique, this research builds on theory and provides important managerial implications in the areas of other customers, attributions, and service failure. Results find that customers experience emotions, including anger, frustration, and sympathy. In addition, even though customers attribute that the other customers are responsible for the failure, they still formed negative perceptions and behaviors toward the firm. Third, results find that management often did nothing to recover from the failure, which further exacerbated negative perceptions and behaviors.
Despite the prominence of customer-employee relationships in service contexts, little empirical research examines the antecedents of rapport in relation to service providers' attributes. Furthermore, while prior studies examine only piecemeal aspects of employee attributes, this research uses a more encompassing approach by considering multiple attributes simultaneously. The results from a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects experimental design suggest that employee eye contact and courtesy are critical components of building customer-employee rapport, and subsequently customer satisfaction, while appearance surprisingly did not affect customer-employee rapport. A significant interaction effect between employee eye contact and courtesy was found. The findings build on the rapport literature and have important managerial implications for highcontact services, such as hospitality and tourism.
Tangible cues are critical indicators of customer perceptions of authenticity and behavioral intentions. Few studies examine multiple dimensions of authenticity, the influence of language in service settings, and the effects of the service provider appearance. This research addresses these gaps by presenting two between-subjects experimental design studies, the first examines the tangible cues of menu presentation (menu item name and item description), and the second examines the tangible cues of the employee (ethnicity and name). Both measure customer perceptions of food, culture, and employee authenticity, customer revisit intentions, and willingness to pay more in an ethnic restaurant. Results find that using an ethnic menu name and possessing employees of referent ethnic origin have the largest impacts on customer perceptions of authenticity. Additionally, food authenticity has the largest impact on revisit intention and culture and employee authenticity have the largest impact on willingness to pay more.
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