Measuring the hospitality experience (scale development and accreditation) and its impact on customer satisfaction

One of the main prerequisites of the tourism industry, which is an important links in the tourism value chain, is the development and prosperity of the hotel industry. Any success in today's post-competitive age, however, requires attention to the needs and wants of customers, and hotels with no exception and to the issues of quality and behavior, including intimacy and hospitality to guests. Therefore, certain tools are needed to adopt scientific methods to improve hospitality conditions in customer services. Since the increase and strengthening of hospitality is an effective component for the development of the tourism industry, this article seeks to examine the customers' experiences regarding hospitality, identify the dimensions of this concept, and provide a scale to measure it. Also, the impact of the hospitality experience on customer satisfaction in the hospitality industry is examined as one of the most important links in the tourism value chain.

In this applied, descriptive and survey research, the background of the subject was  first studied and analyzed, and  then the opinion of experts (through in-depth and semi-structured interviews and the Delphi technique) was used to explore and summarize the dimensions of the scale and seven experimental dimensions of the guest. Hospitality was extracted through a field study using a questionnaire with 32 items about the mentioned dimensions given to 480 hotel customers in Iran in March 2016. Due to the unknown size of the statistical population, cluster sampling and available methods were used. The exploratory phase included a review of the existing literature, opinions of experts, pundits and customers on the concept of hospitality, which led to the conceptualization of the experience of hospitality and the recognition of nine empirical dimensions for hospitality. The dimensions included welcome, comfort, empathy, servitude, gratitude, independence, surprise, efficiency and entertainment. Through examining the results of the exploratory phase, it was not expected that surprise and entertainment would be among the experimental dimensions of hospitality, but they emerged to be prerequisites for understanding one or more of the other seven dimensions. The results of the confirmation phase also supported this idea. This is because the measurements of surprise and entertainment did not respond to factor analysis nor did they appear as separate factors. The exploratory phase initially led to the identification of 71 traits that were considered as input to the construction of the hospitality scale, but gradually, according to experts, this reduced to a 28-factor scale in seven dimensions in field studies.

Confirmatory factor analysis of the data, while confirming the significant relationship between exploratory dimensions and the main concept, showed that the dimensions of comfort, efficiency, special communication, welcome, personalization, and specific hotel conditions and cordiality respectively have the highest factor loads. They were on a scale of hospitality experience. Therefore, the conceptual model of the research led to the creation of a scale that measured the concept of hospitality experience by seven main dimensions (hidden variables) and 28 explicit indicators (questionnaire questions). Based on the results of the factor analysis for the latent variables and the standard coefficients obtained, the impact of each dimension on the concept was calculated. Overall, the results of the factor analysis showed that the dimensions of comfort, efficiency, special communication, welcome, personalization, special hotel conditions and cordiality respectively had the highest factor loads and the greatest impacts on the variable hospitality experience. The analysis of structural equations of the research model using the LISREL software also showed the positive effect of hospitality experience on guest satisfaction.

In general, this research can improve the service industry's insight into what people experience as hospitality. In addition, the Hospitality Experience Scale is a good tool for understanding how hospitality is presented by the organization from a customer perspective. In the end, the effect of hospitality experience was examined using the scale on customer satisfaction, which confirmed the positive effect of desirable hospitality on guest satisfaction. Therefore, in a competitive and growing environment of the hotel industry, which is one of the important links in the vast tourism value chain, in order to succeed and steal the lead from others, activists in this field need to take advantage of a hospitable approach to satisfy customers and build loyalty.