An attributional approach to hotel selection. Part 2: The customers’ perceptions

Abstract

This paper (the second in a series of four) presents the findings of a study of the views of UK hotel customers when identifying the perceived importance of hotel selection and quality assessment attributes. A brief review of the methodology is presented together with an analysis of customer preferences and characteristics. As the first article in the series concentrated upon the important attributes, this paper focuses on the interjacent and relatively unimportant attributes. A discussion of the findings reveals that customers view leisure, entertainment and children‐related services as relatively unimportant. The results confirm the importance of competence and the characteristics and performance of the service provider. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Emotions, price and quality expectations in hotel services

“…(a) Observed price: This variable was measured by asking for the nightly rate for the room (McCleary et al, 1998) as well as the type of room booked (Callan, 1998). Throughout the study, the price refers to a double room without breakfast, including tax.…”

“…The following measurements were chosen from the literature: expected price (Callan, 1998), differential psychological price thresholds (Lewis and Shoemaker, 1997), frequency of hotel stays (Callan, 1998), loyalty to the hotel or hotel chain (Zeithaml et al, 1996), importance of the choice of hotel to the customer (Herrmann et al, 2004), tendency to take advantage of promotional offers (Kalwani and Yim, 1992), hotel brand type (national vs local) (Pecotich and Ward, 2007) and difficulty of comparing hotels (Urbany et al, 1996).…”

Determinants of customer loyalty and purchasing behavior for full-service and limited-service hotels

“…The items were adapted from previous research on factors that are important to hotel buyers (e.g., Callan, 1998;Cobanoglu et al, 2003;Chu and Choi, 2000;Lewis, 1984;Lockyer, 2005;Millar and Baloglu, 2008), and supplemented with items created for the current research. The objective was to capture the broad dimensions that drive hotel selection, as opposed to obtaining detailed information about a specific dimension such as service, which was the approach used by many of the reviewed studies.…”

Modelling Chinese consumer choice behavior with budget accommodation services

“…A large number of studies have examined the factors the determine consumers' hotel choice behavior (Jones and Chen, 2011). With only a few exceptions, the majority of these studies have largely focused on identifying hotel attributes and measuring the relative importance of these selection criteria (Lewis, 1985;McCleary et al, 1993;Callan, 1994Callan, , 1996Callan, , 1997Callan, , 1998Clow et al, 1994). While the hotel selection attributes identified continuously increased from 66 in an early study by Lewis (1984) to as many as 166 in Callan's subsequent study (1998), it has increasingly argued in recent years that the results of these studies had technical flaws (Jones and Chen, 2011;Verma et al, 2002Verma et al, , 2010Verma and Plaschka, 2003;Victorino et al, 2005).…”

“…room cleanness, room rate, location and hotel facilities) and travelers' characteristics (e.g. demographic, psychological, behavioral variables and historical experience) (Lewis, 1984(Lewis, , 1985McCleary et al, 1993;Callan, 1994Callan, , 1996Callan, , 1997Callan, , 1998Clow et al, 1994;Knuston, 1988;Saleh and Ryan, 1992;Taninecz, 1990;Chou andChen, 2014, Tsai et al, 2015). Based on the literature review, with consideration of unique features of budget hotels in China (Huang and Sun, 2014; and the working experience of one of the authors (a senior manager of an economy hotel chain in China), we chose three tangible hotel attributes to specify the hotel utility function in the choice modelling, namely, price, location and hotel facility.…”