Hotel Customer Experience: Mediating the Service Quality-Satisfaction Relationship: An Abstract

The current study positions guest experience as the focal variable in understanding guest satisfaction. Two sets of hotel studies are reviewed. In the first set, the term experience is used interchangeably with overall satisfaction. For example, Manhas and Tukamushaba (2015) defines the experience quality as the overall level of customer satisfaction with service. In the second set, Ren, Qiu, Wang, and Lin (2016) demonstrates a link between experience and customer satisfaction in the budget hotel context. The Ren et al. (2016) is perhaps the most relevant to the current paper and uses three dimensions of experience: tangible-sensory experience (e.g. cleanliness, quietness); staff interactional experience; and aesthetic experience (visual appeal). However, service quality is not included in their model. Hence, the missing gap in the literature is a comprehensive study that specifies service quality and experience as separate constructs, demonstrates that they are separate discriminate constructs, and examines the differential effect of each on guest satisfaction.

Data was gathered via survey targeting hotels guests who had stayed at 3-star to 5-star hotels in Indonesia, in the past 12 months (n = 324). Ro (2012) three-steps regression was applied to analyse mediating role of experience in service quality-satisfaction relationship.

The results show that both service quality and experience influence customer satisfaction. A major finding of the study is that experience mediates the relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction. The mediation is partial, with a smaller direct role still played by the service quality attribute of ambience. Nonetheless, service quality per se is not as strategically important for its own sake; rather only if it is leveraged to provide a better hotel guest experience. The new vital emphasis must now be on the overall guest experience, not simply on the more operational variables of service quality. Service quality must still be managed by necessity, but managers must give at least equal attention to the overall guest experience. If the hotel management’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) do not include experience aspects, then they are missing attention to half of their strategic assets. The first contribution of this paper is to evaluate the differential role of service quality and experience in directly influencing guest satisfaction. Secondly, this study reveals that experience mediates the relationship between service quality and guest satisfaction. It can also provide hotel managers with more understandings about hotel guest’s experience to improve guest’s satisfaction level.