Understanding the Consumer Experience: An Exploratory Study of Luxury Hotels

Price, exclusivity and luxury: Exploring London’s luxury hotels

“…From a more theoretical standpoint, a new proposition is put forward suggesting that a new phenomenon entitled conspicuous pricing methods is in motion, with the idea that price in itself can be seen to enhance a guest's stance within society, similar to the concept of conspicuous consumption (Veblen, 1899), based upon the price they (the guest) pay for a hotel room per night. This new proposition can be said to Figure 4: From top to bottom, H5, H15, H22 -pictures used for visual stimulus analysis lead into another, with the suggestion that the higher the price, the greater the experience for a guest.…”

“…Price enhances exclusivity to separate those who can afford from those who cannot (McKinsey and co., 1990), ultimately differentiating the rich from the poor. Purchasers of high-priced goods and services enhance their perceived status compared to the rest of society (Veblen, 1899;Wang & Griskevicius, 2014). Figure 1 was devised as a visual representation of the interpretations made through reviewing the literature.…”

“…Walls, Okumus, Wang and Kwun (2011) highlight how the consumer experience within a luxury hotel constitutes both the physical environment and the human-interaction dimensions. Bojanic (1996) in that there is a strong positive correlation and investment from luxury hotels in placing emphasis on the staff and quality of the surrounding environment.…”

“…Being able to conspicuously consume (Veblen, 1899) hotel accommodation not available to most other hotel service consumers nourishes the status needs of these guests, reinforcing their perceived sense of status and uniqueness. Price therefore is a fundamental part of this luxury and exclusive experience (Kapferer & Laurent, 2016).…”

How Can Consumer Research Contribute to Increased Understanding of Tourist Experiences? A Conceptual Review

“…As the former has contributed with overall structural frameworks of tourist experiences, the latter has offered empirically based conceptualizations on micro level. In studies of experience in tourism research there are several references to the "experiential turn" in consumer research (Borrie & Roggenbuck, 2001;Chan, 2009;Jennings et al, 2009;Prebensen & Foss, 2011;Ritchie & Hudson, 2009;Volo, 2009;Walls, Okumus, Wang, & Kwun, 2011b), and the most popular seems to be Holbrook and Hirschman (1982). Unfortunately, there have been limited attempts of bridging the gap and of obtaining better integrations between different schools of thoughts on travel motivation and experiences in tourism research, first of all between the primarily individualistic psychological orientation and the wider sociological social orientation (Dann, 2014;Jamal & Lee, 2003).…”