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The purpose of this paper is to study the components and service standards of delightful service by conducting a comprehensive literature review and applying the Delphi survey method.

This study conducted a three-round Delphi survey to consolidate the experience of 11 experts in implementing delightful service. To ensure the recruitment of experts who were knowledgeable in delightful service delivery, the panellists were chosen from service- and hospitality-related industries; the respondents were hotel managers, senior frontline service personnel and academic educators who were knowledgeable in both the service industry and service innovation.

By integrating professional experiences from both academics and hotel practitioners, we conclude that hotel facilities and amenities, environment and ambiance design and service personnel’s service delivery practices are essential elements for creating a unique and unforgettable consumer experience. Distinctive hotel facilities and ambiance provide a unique experience, which can leave memorable impressions on customers. Being able to detect customers’ emotional conditions and hidden needs through attentive and proactive service practice and providing attentive and customized service are pivotal for service personnel. Advanced service performance enables attending to customers’ personal well-being and caring for their unique needs effectively. The proposed standard for service provision exceeds customer expectations.

First, the number of panellists was low, limiting the generalizability of the results. Future studies should increase the number of panellists. Second, this study focused only on the hotel industry in Taiwan. The results may not be generalizable to other hospitality industries or other countries. Future studies can duplicate this study in other hospitality industries and in other countries to broaden the understating of the elements and service standards of delightful service.

The results of this study provide a practical guideline for implementing delightful service. Hotel practitioners are advised to increase the degree of refinement, variety and attentiveness of their facilities and amenities; use sensory elements in their hotel environment and ambiance design; and advance staff members’ service skills to be more proactive, attentive, empathetic and customer-oriented. Carefully designing the core product and advancing the service delivery style can provide hotel guests with an exceptional and unique lodging experience, thus achieving delight.

This study provides a comprehensive understanding of the implementation of delightful service.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the essential abilities service employees need to deliver an exceptional service that delights customers and to identify effective methods to train exceptional service employees.

The authors conducted in-depth interviews with seven senior butlers and three human resource managers from four of the most renowned five-star hotels in Taiwan. Interviews with the two groups of participants provided good triangulation and allowed us to gain different perspectives and to obtain a more holistic understanding of the research topic.

This study systematically organized the essential abilities required to deliver delightful service into three hierarchical levels: professionalism, the ability to respond to customers’ emotions and hidden needs and build bonds with them, and the ability to deliver one-stop service. The authors propose that the most effective training method is to develop a customer-oriented service climate. Such an environment will enable service employees to be naturally molded into exceptional service personnel. Several training methods are identified to build a customer-oriented service environment within a company.

This study focused on the staff of five-star hotels. The proposed service standards and abilities may only be applicable to high-end service providers. Furthermore, this study used only a qualitative research method (in-depth interviews) to develop a preliminary training model to foster outstanding service employees. This model can be further verified using a quantitative method and a larger number of participants in a future study.

This research provides contributions to the literature on delightful service and human resources management.

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.

This paper aims to propose a conceptual framework to investigate the influences of innovative services on customer satisfaction and behavioural intentions. As service innovation has been focusing on the influences of product and technology innovation, this paper provides another insight into service innovation.

The proposed conceptual framework is based on findings from reviewing key theories and concepts, together with relevant literature in the service operation management, service innovation and hospitality management.

The proposed conceptual framework can be used to test empirically and explicate customer satisfaction and behavioural intentions towards service innovation of the hospitability operations. There are seven determinants can influence customer satisfaction: innovative mechanic clues, innovative humanic clues and innovative functional clues to influence customer transaction-specific satisfaction; complexity, meaningfulness, novelty and affordability to influence customer overall satisfaction. Customer expectation is formed by social factors, information, knowledge and their need to influence their actual perception, and the comparison between customers’ expectation and actual perception cause their satisfaction. The relationships amongst transaction-specific satisfaction, overall satisfaction and behavioural intentions can explain customer satisfaction comprehensively as a process of before, during and after their perception.

This paper highlights the importance of innovative service delivery and customers’ evaluation to contribute to creating service innovation. A synthetic definition of service innovation emphasised can help practitioners to define key determinants to effectively influence customer satisfaction and their behavioural intentions. Thus, marketing strategy aligned with operation management, can be practised appropriately.

This study provides key determinants to influencing customer satisfaction of service innovation through innovative service delivery in the hospitality operation, based on key theories and relevant literature.

本论文建立一个理论模型, 以研究创新型服务对顾客满意度和行为意向的影响。随着服务创新逐渐成为产品科技创新的焦点, 本论文针对服务创新提出一个新的角度。

本论文采用审阅服务运营管理、服务创新、和酒店管理的关键理论和概念, 提出理论模型。

本论文提出的理论模型可以进行实际测试, 以检测酒店运营中服务创新相关的顾客满意度和行为意向。研究表明, 影响顾客满意度的因素有七个：创新性硬件因子、创新性人文因子、创新性功能性因子以影响顾客交易方面的满意度、复杂性、有意义性、新意、以及可负担度以决定整体顾客满意度。顾客期待是由社会因子、信息、知识、和其影响实际感官的需求、以及顾客期待和实际感知之间的差别。交易性满意度、整体满意度、和行为意向之间的关系能够全面解释顾客满意度, 其在感知前、中、和后的过程中。

本论文强调了创新性服务流程和顾客评价对服务创新的重要性。本论文综合文献给出服务创新的概念能够帮助从业人员找到有效影响顾客满意度和行为意向的关键因素。因此, 制定出配合运营管理中的营销策略。

本论文根据审视关键理论和相关文献, 提出了酒店运营中营销服务创新的顾客满意度关键因素。

Quality in foodservices has become essential, and new methodological ways of determining service quality enable a better representation of service processes and help to increase revisits. This paper focuses on the foodservice context and explores the relationship between staff-related service dimensions, atmosphere, food quality and revisit in a full-service setting.

This study combines an often neglected mystery guest approach with partial least square–structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to shed more light on customers' service perceptions. The mystery guest approach has been updated with a digitally supported smartphone questionnaire (e-mystery) that provides more reliable results since previous measurements experienced difficulties of feasibility in time-limited settings (N = 247).

The findings of this study confirm the direct effects of the service quality dimensions reliability, attentiveness and atmosphere on revisit intention and highlight the mediating role of food quality. In detail, the findings showed significant results for service employees' reliability and attentiveness and underlined the role of atmosphere for revisit intention.

The contribution of this paper supplements that mystery guest approaches represent a reliable alternative to convenience sampling, especially in combination with a digitally supported questionnaire (e-mystery). Thereby, this paper suggests the further application of e-mystery for the hospitality and tourism industry. In terms of implications, this study highlights the importance of securing food quality by fostering specialized schools and training programs for career starters. Since the findings stress the importance of service quality and atmosphere, managers need to ensure that employees are trained in culturally sensitive communication and services to excel in service-related dimensions.

The purpose of the study is to explore the relationship among organisation information technology support (OITS), knowledge sharing behaviour (KSB) and service innovation performance (SIP) in the context of the Indian Hospitality Industry (IHI). This study also attempts to examine the role of KSB as a mediator in the relationship between IT support and SIP and the firm age test as a moderating variable for service innovation performance.

Proposed relations are empirically examined, and the study was carried out on 115 employees from 71 randomly selected hotels situated in the major five travel destinations of Uttarakhand state of India. Initially, confirmatory factor analysis was performed to validate the construct, afterword structural equation modeling (SEM)-Path analysis was accomplished. The researcher examines the mediation and moderation relations of the variables through statistical tests executed with the help of AMOS 24 and SPSS 26.

The study result indicated that organisation IT support has a positive influence on knowledge sharing and SIP. The mediation result findings showed KSB is partially mediated between OITS and SIP. Sequentially, firm age moderation found the statistical results shown significant difference in young and old hotels.

This study only covers the aspect of the “knowledge sharing behaviour” dimension among the major organizations’ IT support capabilities and examined both variables that might be anticipated in SIP. Considering this limitation, new areas of research investigation are open to future researchers.

The study has both theoretical and managerial implications for academicians, practitioners and researchers. An attempt to conceptualise detailed insights on organisational IT support adaptation and KSB enhancement, which further leads to lifting SIP. Moreover, the study recommended for professionals to implement KM practices and mobilise the knowledge resources optimally to achieve better organizational outcomes.

The study attempts to delineate the proposed relationship and provides valuable insights for practitioners and academicians by including the knowledge sharing dimension to improve the SIP context of the IHI.

Responding to an increasing call for a more comprehensive conceptualization of customer delight, the purpose of this paper is to expand the theory of customer delight and to examine the implications of such an expanded view for service theory and practice.

This paper presents the results of three qualitative studies. The first study explores customer delight through self-reported consumption experiences in customer-selected contexts, followed by one-on-one in-depth interviews. The second involves focus groups and the third examines self-reported incidents of delightful customer experiences.

This research finds that customer delight goes beyond extreme satisfaction and joy and surprise to include six properties that—individually or in combination—characterize customer delight. An expanded conceptualization of how customer delight can be defined is proposed in which customer delight is associated with various combinations of six properties – the customer experiencing positive emotions, interacting with others, successful problem-solving, engaging customer’s senses, timing of the events and sense of control that characterizes the customer's encounter.

It is clear from the findings of this research that there is no single property that is associated with delight. Through the facilitation of multiple properties, managers have the potential to create a multitude of routes to delight. It is recommended that future research (1) identify and explicate these alternative routes for engendering delight using the six properties identified, and (2) develop a general typology based on service context and characteristics, customer segment, etc. that further stimulates scholarship on delight, and offers more industry-specific insights for managers.

Insights from this investigation will encourage managers and service designers to think more broadly and creatively about delight. Doing so will open up new opportunities for achieving customer delight, beyond merely focusing on extreme satisfaction or surprise and joy strategies currently dominating discussions of customer delight.

This paper makes several contributions to the service literature. First, it extends current conceptualizations of customer delight and offers an expanded definition. Next, it demonstrates how this new understanding extends the existing literature on delight. Finally, it proposes an agenda for future delight research and discusses managerial implications, opening up new opportunities for firms to design delightful customer experiences.

Service excellence has been recognized as a crucial means of achieving customer delight. Several recent studies have argued that redundant services may be perceived as unnecessary by customers; however, few studies have explored the construct of service redundancy. This study aims to identify and classify service redundancy in the foodservice industry.

This qualitative study conducted in-depth interviews with 72 participants, namely, 36 customers and 36 managers of fine dining restaurants in Taiwan. Content analysis of the data yielded the classification of service redundancy.

This study determined 16 categories of service redundancy categorized under three themes: service behavior, service regulations and environmental factors. Furthermore, six causes and four consequences of service redundancy were identified.

Customers and managers of fine dining restaurants were interviewed; thus, the findings may not be fully generalizable to service redundancy in other restaurant types.

The contribution of this research is the construction of a model of service redundancy, which could serve as a theoretical foundation for further examination of service redundancy and the relationships between the related constructs.

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.

As the elderly population in Korea grows, sales of travel packages for elderly people are also increasing. Senior tourists should spend much time with other tourists because of the nature of package travel. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the significance of rapport with other tourists in the elderly tourist context. Specifically, the current study examined the relationship between other customer perceptions and rapport with other tourists. In addition, this study investigated the influences of rapport with other tourists on tour quality, tour satisfaction and word-of-mouth.

This paper collected data from 411 elderly tourists in Korea and conducted a structural equation modeling analysis to test nine hypotheses.

Physical appearance and suitable behavior positively affect rapport with other tourists and thus aid in increasing tour quality, tour satisfaction and word-of-mouth.

In service marketing, there is a general consensus that customers are influenced by other customers who use the same service facility because they recognize other customers as the environment of the service facility. The concept of other customer perceptions was applied to tourism marketing in this study in combination with another understudied concept, rapport. This study is one of the first, as per the authors’ knowledge, to apply those important concepts to the tourism industry in particular, although there has been a considerable body of research in the service marketing field. Consequently, the findings of this paper would be meaningful and useful for travel agencies when developing a marketing strategy to enhance rapport between tourists.