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Despite multiple studies of customer delight in various service industries, limited research exists in the hedonically driven theme park context. The purpose of this paper is to explore the key drivers of customer delight and outrage in theme parks by analyzing TripAdvisor’s comments from visitors to the top 20 North American theme parks.

Following the analysis of thousands of extremely positive and negative comments using MAXQDA qualitative software, keywords drivers of delight and outrage were identified. The researchers applied both thematic and root cause in order to ascertain the sources leading to both positive and negative consumer feedback.

Delighted guests relayed various aspects of their experience including positive affect experience, positive value perceptions, and limited wait times. Root causes that influenced customer delight included: excellent core product, quality food and beverage, servicescape, pricing decisions, and low visitor demand or sensible admissions policies. Outraged guests described various aspects of their experiences such as negative perceptions of value, long waits, poor customer service, and negative emotions. Root causes for customer outrage included low quality or deficient core products, poor quality of food and beverage, poor facility maintenance, aggressive pricing decisions, poor staff selection, training, and working conditions, and high customer demand on any given date or aggressive admissions policies.

The present research is unique in that it exposes the key themes of customer delight and outrage in the theme park setting, presents a conceptual model, and analyzes its root causes.

Entrepreneurial marketing is a hybrid concept of entrepreneurship and marketing defining business for future challenges. This study aims to examine the following two issues of entrepreneurial marketing concerning impact of perceived quality on customer delight: first, identifying entrepreneurial marketing factors of delight and customer perceived quality to develop the model; second, applying the aforesaid model to discriminate customer delight in categories of gender as male delight and female delight.

In this endeavour, the authors examined the data collected from survey of Indian mobile users. In total ten perceived quality predictor variables are used to measure customer delight. Further, for identifying the difference in male delight and female delight, discriminant analysis is used.

The conceptual and empirical vantage point of study provides a framework to entrepreneurs emphasizing on male and female customers distinctly during marketing.

The results are used to sketch the profile of male and female customer segment, and innovative applications are discussed for business success. Though proposed approach is limited to gender, mobile users still open the avenue for researchers to work on other demographic factors and product categories.

The theoretical underpinnings warrant practical applications of quality dimensions in telecom market for creation of customer delight. The present gender classification of customer delight will assist the entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and product developers in developing the competitive business policy.

The classification of male and female delight suggests the female segment of Indian telecom market is socially important and as similar to the male segment.

The study is a novel assessment of customer delight on gender quality perception contributing the newly explored concept of entrepreneurial marketing.

This paper aims to understand how male and female hotel guests become delighted customers. It aims to present the similarities and differences along with respective implications for theory and application.

During a period of three months, tourists were interviewed at an upscale Florida hotel. A total of 208 semi-structured interviews were conducted. The script for the interviews was based on an interview protocol used by Crotts et al. Adapted from a previous customer delight study (Torres and Kline), a codebook was developed to determine the salient themes that emerged during the interview process. Interviews were coded independently by three experienced reviewers using the process of content analysis.

The results demonstrated that while men and women agreed on most aspects of the service experience that led them to feel delighted, there were other aspects of the delight experience that seemed to vary by gender. More specifically, female guests were more likely to be delighted by employee friendliness and professionalism. In contrast, male tourists appeared to be more likely to be delighted by having their needs met, by efficient and timely service and by the availability of complimentary amenities or upgrades.

The present study contributes to existing literature by demonstrating that men and women can potentially be delighted by different aspects of the service experience. Such information can potentially benefit hospitality industry practitioners to deliver service experiences desired by each gender.

Ekinci et al. proposed that the ultimate evaluation of customer experiences can be highly individualized by elements such as personality. The present research argues that the process of delighting customers might be more complex than originally conceived. Accordingly, the results suggest: a universal set of criteria will tend to delight all guests, and a more specific set of criteria will potentially delight guests of a certain gender. Future research is encouraged to quantitatively validate the findings and explore other factors that impact customer delight such as personality, age, income and culture.

This article seeks to develop a managerial model that will aid in the effective management of customer relations. This study explains in detail the concepts of satisfaction and delight; their antecedents and potential outcomes.

An extensive review of existing customer delight literature reveals the key concepts necessary for customer delight to occur.

Customer delight is a better measure of customer relationship management than customer satisfaction. Delight is likely to generate positive business results such as word‐of‐mouth communications, loyalty and increased profitability. Using existing literature a model is developed.

The proposed model can be used by managers to achieve customer delight in their organizations. It can also be used to gain a better understanding of the process of managing customer relations.

In the last few years the concept of customer delight has been taking precedence over the concept of satisfaction. Despite such emphasis, there are few published articles relating to this topic in the hotel industry. The study uses customer delight literature from various industries and attempts to apply such knowledge to the hospitality industry.

Delighting customers by pleasant surprises is a common strategy, yet the potential downside of such a strategy (i.e. raising customer expectations) has received scant attention. The purpose of this study is to examine the role of explanations as a solution to control customers ' expectations following a surprise-delight event.

Hypotheses were tested with a 2 (surprise)×2 (explanation) between-subjects experimental design in two different service contexts (utilitarian and hedonic). University staff and faculty members served as the participant pool.

The results indicate that providing an explanation helps to avoid raising customer expectations to unsustainable levels and enhances customer delight.

Using hypothetical scenarios, single test for each context, and having the participants with high educational and income levels are identified as limitations in this study.

This study demonstrates that providing appropriate explanations can reduce escalating expectations for future consumption episodes and thus help service firms to effectively delight their customers.

This is the first empirical study to test the use of explanation as a possible solution for problems associated with surprise strategies, therefore extending the relevant literature.

Historically, firms have dedicated an abundance of resources in the pursuit of customer satisfaction and its corresponding favorable consequences. However, research indicates that customer satisfaction may not necessarily result in the outcomes pursued. This paper aims to focus on the concept of customer delight and explore antecedents and consequences of interest to the service firm. More specifically, the proposed model explores the linkages of employee effort, employee expertise and the firm’s tangibles to customer surprise and joy which in turn lead to customer delight and per cent of budget spent.

Data were collected from a grocery store. The hypothesized relationships were tested using structural equation modeling.

Results from this study yield new insights into the dual pathways leading to customer delight through joy and surprise. That is, joy and tangibles lead to both joy and surprise, whereas expertise leads to joy alone. Both joy and surprise are completely mediated through delight to per cent of budget spent. Interestingly, higher frequency customers experience a stronger relationship from joy to delight.

The findings have implications for the ongoing debate on the viability of customer delight and extending the theoretical understanding of why customer delight represents such a powerful force in the service environment.

By providing specific variables that impact both joy and surprise, management can develop tactics to develop delight initiatives.

This is the first study proposing multiple paths to customer delight. Further, this is the first study to link needs based and disconfirmation into a single model.

The purpose of this study is to discover the factors affecting customer delight, satisfaction and dissatisfaction in fine dining experiences (FDEs).

Online user generated 2,585 reviews on TripAdvisor for 46 five-star hotel restaurants operating in Istanbul were analyzed with the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) algorithm.

LDA created nine, eight and seven topics for delight, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, respectively. The most salient topics for customer delight, satisfaction and dissatisfaction in FDEs are staff (17.3%), view (19%), and food quality (23%), respectively.

This study is one of the few studies investigating customer delight and satisfaction together. The study shows that FDEs can be analyzed with text mining techniques. Moreover, the study contributes to the literature on customer delight by adding staff topic as an antecedent.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a typology of customer delight in the hotel industry. By doing so, it identifies patterns by which hotels delight their guests. The paper explores the Torres and Kline model in light of the data and proposes an addition to the model.

Content analysis is utilized to analyze letters of customer feedback provided by several hotels. A codebook was created, letters were coded by two raters and inter-rater reliability was calculated.

The most frequently mentioned codes included: taking care of the guest's needs, exceptional friendliness, professionalism of staff, employees going outside of the call of duty and problem-solving skills. Based on this information the authors propose the following delight types: fulfillment delight, charismatic delight, professional delight, comparative delight, problem resolution delight. It was also found that the culture of an organization has an impact on the type of delight that is most prevalent.

The research conducted helps hotel operators to identify the behaviors and actions that lead their guests to be delighted. By knowing this information, appropriate steps can be taken in the selection and development of staff that will lead towards greater customer engagement.

In the hospitality literature, much information exists on what to do to correct negative service experiences. However, a relatively smaller number of articles highlight how to create great service experiences for the guests. This article provides a theoretically sound and practically useful framework to delight hotel guests in the hotel industry.

This research seeks to present a methodology for investigating the generalizability of a theory‐testing model. The methodology is used to examine the generalizability of a model of the antecedents and consequences of customer delight.

Theory testing of models in the marketing often fails to define an intended universe of generalization. This paper shows how multivariate generalizability theory can be used to estimate construct covariance components for specific sources of variance. These components can then be used to assess the generalizability of a structural equation model of a marketing phenomenon.

The parameters of a model of customer delight obtained from data that sample customers of a service or data that confound sources of variance do not generalize to data that capture variation across services or variation across raters. The relative impact of customer delight and satisfaction on behavioral intention varies with the source of variation being studied.

Previous research suggests that after controlling for customer satisfaction, customer delight accounts for very little variation in behavioral intention. But, for the source of variation of most relevance to managers, namely web sites, it is customer delight, not customer satisfaction, that is strongly associated with behavioral intention.

The methodology can be applied and can produce model parameters having substantially different managerial implications for the management of customer satisfaction and customer delight.

The aim of this study is to determine whether the cumulative effects of satisfaction, trust, and perceived value may, under certain conditions, provide more explanatory power for customer loyalty intentions than the often studied and more elusive customer delight. Herzberg's two-factor theory is used to explain why the frequent nature of grocery shopping, a primarily utilitarian experience, might introduce considerations that have not yet been addressed in the study of delight.

A survey is administered to a quota sample of Portuguese supermarket shoppers via phone, using a CATI system.

Research findings suggest that perceived value, trust, and satisfaction have a greater impact on behavioural outcomes than customer delight in the grocery shopping setting. In such a setting, cognitive drivers may be even more important for customers who are primarily concerned with hygiene factors (rather than motivators).

Retailers are encouraged to focus on the more mundane factors that influence consumers' perceptions of value and trust rather than trying to invest in the substantial resources required to continually delight consumers. Future research may explore other determinants of loyalty intentions and test the extended model in different service sectors, cultural contexts and countries.

This study applies Oliver et al.'s consumer delight model in a utilitarian, frequent-use setting, finding previously undiscovered limitations to its validity.