It is all about the emotional state: Managing tourists’ experiences

When consuming tourism and leisure services tourists do not only expect professional services but also desire satisfying emotional experiences. To measure satisfaction with emotional experiences traditional service quality and satisfaction research is outdated because those models are based on cognitive components and neglect emotional aspects of customer satisfaction. This research investigates factors determining the service setting that enhance customers’ emotional reactions and lead to psychological states and behaviours. Referring to existing theories and empirical evidence in environmental psychology, a research model is developed explaining the relationship between different components of service settings influencing emotional states and satisfaction. Guests’ emotions are assessed during service consumption in hotel settings in order to investigate the importance of emotional states. The paper derives three main factors (leisure experience, hardware and human ware) significantly influencing emotional states of customers in high-quality hotels.

► We model the relationships between the service setting and emotional state.
► Flow-experience, human-ware and hardware influence guest's emotional state.
► Situational variables (e.g. age, gender) only weakly affect the emotional state. Customer statisfaction depends on the emotional state.