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Weekly UpdatesThis article identifies the underlying dimensions of a guest's hotel experience, using data from a web-based survey of guests at a midwestern hotel and conference center. This study finds that the dimensions obtained in exploratory factor analysis can be replicated by confirmatory factor analysis with the same data set. These scale-development procedures result in an eighteen-item index consisting of four factors: environment, accessibility, driving benefit, and incentive. This four-factor structure of Hotel Experience Index also shows evidence of both convergent and discriminant validity.
An analysis of 163 guests at a midwestern hotel and conference center finds four factors that are key to a hotel guest's experience. The chief factor, labeled "benefit," involves the simple utility of staying at a hotel. Benefit includes safety, reliability, and consistency, as well as location. The next factor, "convenience," refers to the how easy it is to book the room, as well as the logical configuration of the hotel and guest room. A third-ranking factor is "incentive," which comprises the worth of the experience, both in monetary and nonmonetary terms. A final factor is "environment." This relates to the hotel's atmosphere, which should be stimulating, entertaining, and motivating. These four factors and their underlying characteristics form a sort of checklist for hotel managers who seek to ensure the best possible hotel experience for their guests.
Keywords: hotel guests' experience; Hotel Experience Index; exploratory factor analysis; confirmatory factor analysis; scale development
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The essence of experience is that it requires involvement or participation by the person who is involved. Descriptions and visualizations, no matter how sincere and vivid, cannot match actually being in a place or being part of an activity.
Experiences are internal in nature and, therefore, individualized. This is what makes the marketing, measurement, and management of a hotel's experience so difficult. Two people attending the same hotel banquet could sit together, sample the same menu, and hear the same speeches but nevertheless judge the experience in totally different terms. Each person brings a different background, values, attitudes, and beliefs to the situation; each experiences it through his or her individual lens.
Futurist Alvin Toffler (1970) suggested more than thirty years ago that the U.S. economy would be dominated by services, dubbing this development the "experience industries." In the same vein, Pine and Gilmore (1999) renamed the service economy concept as the "experience economy." They further argued that engaging customers through experience, rather than just serving them, is necessary to create value in an increasing competitive business environment.
Elusive and indistinct, experience is difficult to measure, because of its multiple elements and individualized, personal nature. Pine and Gilmore (1999) pointed out that there are clear economic distinctions between experiences and such other items as commodities, goods (products), and services. Commodities are essentially fungible materials. As such, they are only differentiated by price, as determined by supply and demand. Businesses use commodities to make and inventory goods, thus adding the ability to differentiate products and, in turn, add value. The mantra of the 1980s was on customer satisfaction, with zero defects, quality initiatives, and product innovation at the forefront of business strategy to achieve a competitive advantage (Bell 2002). This was the decade of the so-called "amenities creep," when hotels vied to offer the greatest selection of shampoos and other items in their rooms.
The 1990s saw a stronger focus on services, rather than such goods as amenities. Providers added services to their core products and focused on personalized service, customized services, or "customerization" (Bell 2002). Maturation of information technology allowed organizations to compile data marts about their customers--thereby analyzing demographics, psychographics, and behavior patterns. Service quality became a strategy for differentiation.
Most studies about consumer experiences in the retail industry have focused on the tangible elements of the shopping environment (e.g., Berry and Haeckel 2002; Machleit and Eroglu 2000; Mathwick, Malhotra, and Rigdon 2001; Underhill 1999; Wakefield and Blodgett 1999; Wirtz and Bateson 1999). We perceive a void in hospitality research relative to identifying and measuring the dimensions of the guest's hotel experience, even as hotels are aware of the need to create value for their guests in the form of experiences. "Unfortunately," commented Berry and Haeckel (2002, 85), "they have often proceeded as if managing experiences simply meant providing entertainment or being engagingly creative." Walking through a lobby in a Las Vegas hotel, you can have the manufactured experience of the streets of Paris, the canals of Venice, or the forum of Rome. While these casinos offer considerable verisimilitude, experience is more complex than architecture, decor, and costumed employees. These and other hotel operations must incorporate the guest's experience into a focused comprehensive positioning strategy that manages the guest's journey "from the expectations they have before the experience occurs to the assessments they are likely to make when it's over" (p. 85). To be in command of this journey, Berry and Haeckel said businesses must manage two sets of "clues," namely, the actual functionality of the product or service and the set of emotional clues, which stem from things or people in the environment that are perceived by the senses.
Genesis of This Study
In 2003, we launched our investigation of the experience construct by reviewing nearly six hundred articles as we sought connections, correlations, or relationships between the following four constructs: value, service quality, satisfaction, and experience. As a result, we proposed a holistic model that structures the complex relationship among the four major components of a consumer's buying experience: (1) expectations and perceptions of service quality, (2) the consumer's experience with the organization, (3) value, and (4) satisfaction (Knutson and Beck 2003). Prior to development of this model, three of the model's four major components had been identified, measured, and explored in a variety of studies. For example, Zeithaml, Parasuraman, and Berry's (1990) SERVQUAL is a widely used hallmark for service quality. Value has been defined by relative preferences and can be measured by degree of preference (Holbrook 1994). While researchers have developed a myriad of satisfaction measures, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) stands as a valid national economic indicator of customer satisfaction with the quality of goods and services in the United States (Fornell et al. 1996).
In 2005, we developed the thirty-nine-item Consumer Experience Index (CEI) based on seven dimensions of experience (Knutson et al. 2007). The CEI is generalizable, meaning that it would be relevant across a wide spectrum of industries and product categories, but some studies have shown that such a general scale may not be as useful to some industries as an industry-specific scale. For example, Aaker's (1997) Brand Personality Scale has been adapted for use in the restaurant industry (Musante, Bojanic, and Zhang n.d.). Similarly, SERVQUAL has been tailored for use in the lodging industry (Knutson et al. 1992) and the restaurant industry (Stevens, Knutson, and Patton 1995). Using the CEI as a foundation, then, we constructed the Hotel Experience Index (HEI), an index tailored specifically to the lodging industry. The questions were designed (1) to tap the seven dimensions of the CEI; (2) to parallel the intent of these generic questions; but, most important, (3) to specifically capture the essence of the guest's hotel experience. Because the original scale was not designed to be specific to any industry, we deleted two items and reworded several to focus on the hotel experience.
The specific goal of our study was to explore the possibility of modifying the CEI to provide a scale that is relevant to the hotel industry. Another goal was to confirm and validate the HEI factor structure obtained from the exploratory factor analysis by using the confirmatory factor analysis with the same data set.
Methodology
We employed a two-phase survey methodology. On the initial HEI instrument, respondents were asked to indicate (on a 7-point Likert-type scale) the importance of forty-one statements regarding a hotel experience. The survey also asked about the number of nights they stayed in a hotel and the relative percentage of those nights spent for business and for leisure, along with demographic questions. In two pretests, we found no problems with wording or technical issues.
We employed a web-based survey via the online survey company SurveyMonkey.com. The survey was distributed through the guest e-mail fist of a Midwest Hotel and Conference Center. The hotel used its website to invite its guests to participate in the study by "clicking" on a link to the survey's website.
We adopted approaches recommended by Dillman (2000) to ensure an adequate response rate, including multiple contacts with advance alert regarding the study and two follow-up reminders. We sent an email inviting participation and containing the link to the survey's website to 909 guests. We encouraged participation by offering a drawing for $500, and we permitted respondents to print the questionnaire and either mail or fax it to us.
We received 163 responses out of 807 valid email addresses, for a response rate of 20.2 percent. Since several respondents skipped sections of the survey, we deleted responses with an item completion below 90 percent, leaving a usable sample of 152 questionnaires. Checking for nonresponse bias, we found no significant differences in demographic variables between early and late respondents, implying that the characteristics of respondents are representative also of nonrespondents (Dey 1997; Johnson et al. 2000; Sax, Gilmartin, and Bryant 2003).
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