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Consumer behavior in hospitality and tourism
Saurabh Kumar Dixit
, Kuan-Huei Lee
, and Poh Theng Loo
ABSTRACT
Consumer behavior includes individual decision-making (IDM). IDM has implications in customer satisfaction, loyalty and other behavioral intentions toward the organizations’ products and services. Consumer behavior in hospitality and tourism targets to study consumers and tourists in different leisure and touristic places such as hotels, convention centers, amusement parks, national parks and the transportation sector. This present special issue of JGSMS on the “Consumer Behavior in Hospitality and Tourism” applies an interdisciplinary approach in the selection of papers. The aim is to provide a broad view of novel topics and presents the current scenario in the hospitality and business arena. After exhausting double-blind peer review process, the issue includes seven papers. These papers address varied themes relating to consumer behavior ranging from sustainable tourism, environmental issues and green tourism to the impact of hotel online reviews using social media.
酒店业与旅游业中的消费者行为
消费者行为包括个人决策。个人决策对客户满意度、忠诚度和其他对各个组织产品和服务的行为意图方面有影响。酒店和旅游中的消费者行为旨在研究不同休闲和旅游场所的消费者和游客，如酒店、会议中心、游乐园、国家公园和交通部门。本期《全球营销科学学报》特刊主题为“酒店和旅游业中的消费者行为”，在论文选择中采用了跨学科的方法。其目的在于给各类新颖主题提供更为广泛的见解，并且展现出酒店业和商业领域的现状。经过穷尽的双盲审程序后，本期特刊选取了七篇论文。这七篇论文解决了与消费者行为有关的各类主题，从可持续旅游业、环保旅游业、绿色旅游业到使用社交媒体的酒店在线评论所带来的影响。
Introduction
Hospitality and tourism studies are the emerging disciplines where the body of knowledge is evolving with the advancements in the society, culture and human behavior (Dixit, 2018). The study of consumer behavior touches almost every aspect of our daily lives. The origin of consumer behavior literature can be traced back to 1960s, to respond the increasing demand to find a better market segmentation base by segmenting people based on their values (Veal, 1991). In today’s digital and modern world, consumer behavior may be the central theme to understand the key facets of our changing lifestyles. The need for the marketer to be flexible and adaptable to the changing world around them has never been so robust. As competition in the market intensifies and consumers become more demanding from the suppliers, marketers must be increasingly sensitive to a multitude of sociocultural distinctions.
Consumer behavior is a process that involves a transaction where two or more parties (organization or person) give and receive something of value (Solomon, 2015). Consumer behavior has been defined by Blackwell, Miniard and Engel (2001) as “those activities directly involved in obtaining, consuming, and disposing of products and services including the decision processes that precedes and follows these actions”. This definition emphasizes the importance of psychological process that consumer goes through during the prepurchase, purchase and post-purchase stages. The conceptual understanding of consumer behavior would be helpful and worthwhile for marketers to identify ways to develop their marketing and promotional strategies in order to offer better quality of products and services.
Consumer behavior is associated to individual decision-making. The traditional view of decision-making process of the consumers involves five steps such as problem recognition, information search, judgment, decision-making and post-decision processes. Once the buying decision is made and the desired item is purchased, it leads to the final step in the decision-making process, which involves evaluating the outcome. It has implications for customer satisfaction, loyalty and other behavioral intentions toward the organizations.
There are four factors that influence the decision process of a consumer: internal, external, situational and marketing-mix. First, internal factors are related to the cognitive psychology and deal with how consumers receive information from the environment, process and store them. In order to accumulate information, researchers opt for the amalgamation of the internal and external information sources (Gowreesunkar & Dixit, 2017). The decision-making is influenced by personal value, attitude, perception and personality. Second, external factors are those surrounded to the consumer and they are usually related to family members, social class, reference group, culture and subculture of the consumer. Third, situational factors are external to the consumer and are factors related to the context such as the mood of the day, time pressure and information searched. Finally, market factors refer to the marketing mix of four P’s that marketers use to formulate strategies: product, price, place and promotion.
Consumer behavior in hospitality and tourism
Consumer behavior in the arena of hospitality and tourism studies deals with the consumption behavior of guests and tourists. The industrial revolution incentivized the development of lodging and travel industry with Thomas Cook as the initiator of mass tourism in the 19th century, who arranged packaged tours and excursions across Europe. Nowadays, the hospitality and tourism industry involves lodging, event planning, theme parks, transportation, cruise lines, travel agency and food and beverage businesses among others.
The study of consumer behavior in hospitality and tourism includes pre-visit, on-site and post-visit of the tourists to the particular destination. One way of conducting consumer research in hospitality and tourism is through psychographics. Psychographics influence an individual’s everyday routine, activities, interests, opinions, values, needs and perceptions. Consumer research in this area is usually linked with using surveys and analytical studies focus mainly on values, attitudes and market segmentation of the target population. Psychographic variables are useful to identify and segment market. Psychographics register people’s activities (what they do), interests (what they want) and opinions (what they think). Segmentation by psychographic includes age, gender, family structure, social class and income, race and ethnicity, geography and lifestyles. It is common in the hospitality and tourism literate studies trying to understanding guests, visitors and tourists of a particular venue or destination using psychographic segmentation.
Storytelling is another widely used tool in the marketing of hospitality and tourism products. Storytelling is a powerful way of transmitting ideas to the desired person and through narrative of the story. It can assist in the development of many emotional touchpoints to fulfill intangible sentiments that are core human needs. Storytelling is also a useful marketing tool that targets consumer’s emotion, evoke action, create value and easy to remember by the consumer. People who can relate to the story are stimulated to remember more and react to the feelings awakened by the story (Woodside, Sood, & Miller, 2008). Storytelling could be the best tool to engage with tourists and communicate values, history, tradition and common practices of a destination that they visit.
Stages of consumer behavior in hospitality and tourism
In existing literature, researchers have proposed different models of stages of consumer behavior. One of the models is introduced by Aho in 2001, which is related to tourism experience. This dynamic model of tourism experiences consists of a series of seven stages of experience reflecting the tourist behavior. The first stage is initiated with orientation, which relates to the awakening of interest and expectations in their life for memories, tangible artifacts and practices. The second stage is attachment in which tourists strengthen their interest due to the go-decision for the trip. The third stage is the actual visitation of destination and consumption of tourism products. Next is evaluation of their experiences, tourists making comparisons between their earlier experiences and alternatives and make conclusions for future decisions. This is followed by the fifth stage which is storing. Storing can be of three types: social (people and social situation to remember), physical (photos, souvenirs, films) and mental (affections, new meanings and impressions). The final two stages, sixth and seventh, are reflection and enrichment. Reflection is the repeated presentations of their experiences either by spontaneous and staged. Lastly, enrichment is the presentations of photos, souvenirs, arrangement of meetings and networks to cherish memories of trips.
The rapid development of technology in the past decade has influenced the overall consumption process of tourists. Social media, or Web 2.0 as it is popularly known as, has changed drastically the visitor behavior. People have different consumption behavior before, during and after visiting a place. Awareness in eco-tourism, online reviews, social media, big data, Internet of Things and block chain are disrupting the traditional way of consumption.
With the introduction of smart phones, social media and its diverse applications are the main source of communication and information sharing. Applications such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are mediums used to share opinions, reviews about products and interact with other users. Social media is one of the most efficient ways to spread messages across, as it is free and reachable within a few clicks. Four out of five brands now utilize Twitter as a tool of marketing while 65% of small business owners claimed that social media has helped them stay connected with their customers. Since social media has succeeded in making users to be attractive, it has become one of the powerful tools in giving and getting reviews (Leung, Law, van Hoof, & Buhalis, 2013). This kind of sharing is also known as electronic word of mouth (eWOM); consumers nowadays have the habit of sharing own experiences of travels, food and service opinions. These microblogging sites could be the best platforms to attain instant feedbacks which have the potential to influence future consumers (Gupta & Harris, 2010).
The advancement of technology promotes the emergence of online review website such as Trip Advisor, Booking.com, Hotels.com, Expedia.com and social media such as Facebook and Instagram have substantial roles and impacts on tourists’ purchase behavior, especially their pre purchase and post-purchase experiences. Tourists tend to rely heavily on user-generated contents (social media, blogs, online review websites, online communities) to minimize their risks of purchase. The user-generated contents have critical roles in tourist information search and travel behavior beyond as a source of information; indeed, these contents are recognized as part of the tourists’ information search process (Cox, Burgess, Sellitto, & Buultjens, 2009). According to Leung, Law, Hoof and Buhalis (2013), they extensively reviewed literature on social media and highlighted many previous studies on consumer-focused studies on the use and impact of social media in the research stage of tourists’ travel planning process. This finding is supported by an empirical study which pointed out that social media is predominantly used by tourists as primary source of information for travel planning for upcoming trips (Xiang, Magnini, & Fesenmaier, 2015).
Consumer behavior stages in services context cover pre purchase, service encounter and post-purchase (Wirtz, Chew, & Lovelock, 2012). Wirtz and his colleagues categorized service consumption into three main stages in which each stage comprises performances to be done by consumers or service providers. For instance, at the first stage of service consumption model, prepurchase stage begins with the need awareness, information search, evaluation of alternatives to deciding whether to purchase the product or service or not. Under the evaluation of alternatives, consumers should consider the risks involved in purchasing and using the services. There are seven types of perceived risks: (1) functional risk (unsatisfactory performance outcomes), (2) financial risk (monetary loss, unexpected costs), (3) temporal (waste of time due to delays), (4) physical risk (personal injury or damage to belongings), (5) psychological risk (personal fear and emotions), (6) social risk (how others think and react toward purchaser) and sensory risk (unwanted effects on any of the five senses).
Consumer behavior in hospitality and tourism has some unique aspects as this industry consists of many intangible service elements throughout the three main stages. For example, tourist purchases a travel package or books a hotel room that can be considered as an investment with no tangible rate of return and the purchase is usually prepared and planned through careful thoughts and savings made over a period of time (Moutinho, 1987). Due to the unique service characteristics (perishability, inseparability, intangible, h...
