The physical appearance of hotel guests: The impact on service providers’ communication and quality of service

• Research is done as an experimental study with experimental and comparative groups.
• The assessment of physical attractiveness is common in the service encounter.
• There is a correlation between customer attractiveness and quality of service.
• Employees should be trained not to allow guest appearance to influence the service.
• Social workers are trained not to let clients’ appearance affect service rendered.

The purpose of this experimental study was to establish whether there is any correlation between guests’ physical appearance and the quality of service provided to them by front desk hotel staff. The two experimental groups used in this study consisted of hotel receptionists in Portorož, which is the largest hotel industry sector in the Slovenian part of the Adriatic Sea, and a comparative group made up of social workers from Slovenia's social work centres. The research results suggest that there is a positive correlation between the physical appearance of hotel guests and their satisfaction with the quality of service received. In contrast, within the group of social workers and their clients, there was no correlation between the physical appearance of clients and customer service satisfaction. In the study, the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test for testing the normality of the distribution, t-test for independent samples, Pearson's correlation test and descriptive statistics were used.

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