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As the hospitality industry is shifting its focus from service to experience, customers are becoming co-creators of the perceived value of a hospitality service because experiences customers obtained when consuming a hospitality service involve the participation of the customers. Thus, more research is needed to examine the relationships among consumer’s personal factors and their evaluations of hospitality services. This study developed and tested hypotheses that examined the effects of customers’ intrinsic characteristics on their evaluations of a restaurant service. Data were collected from college students in the United States (n = 220) and China (n = 254) using a scenario approach. Findings reveal that customers’ gender, personality, and cultural background had significant effects on their evaluations of a restaurant service. Specifically, female customers rated the same service higher than male customers on the reliability dimension of service quality and overall service quality; customers with personalities of extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness rated the service higher than customers with neuroticism personality on the responsiveness dimension; and customers in individualistic cultures rated the service higher than those in collectivistic cultures on most of the service evaluation measures. Implications of the study’s findings are discussed.

This chapter attempts to explore customer loyalty and retention in the context of Pakistani restaurants. Effects of customer perceived value and service quality as antecedents are tested on customer loyalty and retention along with the mediating effects of customer satisfaction and customer relationship management quality. This chapter is conducted in 15 restaurants from Multan. Results reveal how the restaurant sector lacks a monitoring mechanism that promotes an effective customer relationship. For example, what kinds of measurements the manager could use to enhance a customer's loyalty and retention.

An extant scale concerning festival performance (FESTPERF) was developed to measure service quality perceptions of attendees to an Australian jazz and blues festival. Despite its noted applicability to music festivals, the study by Tkaczynski and Stokes (2010) focused on one festival of a particular type, and the generalizability of its findings to multiple special events and nonmusic events remains untested. To address these research limitations, this study applied FESTPERF to a theater performance and a film festival. One-hundred and sixty valid responses were collected and analyzed using exploratory factor analysis. It was identified that three factors, human service, venue, and performance, represented attendees’ perception of service quality at these special events. The performance factor was also significantly related to satisfaction and repurchase intent. Results from this study provided justification for the usage of the items proposed in the FESTPERF instrument to be applied to different special event settings with some minor modifications. Opportunities for future research are outlined and the limitations of this study are also provided.

This chapter reviews research on the question–behavior effect, the phenomenon that asking questions influences respondents’ behavior. Two distinct research streams, the self-prophecy effect, concerned with socially normative behaviors, and the mere measurement effect, dealing with purchase behaviors without socially normative significance, are identified. Despite the recent attempt at integration, it is argued that there are fundamental differences between the two effects. Distinctions are also drawn between lab-based and field-based mere measurement effects, and between normatively consistent and implicit attitude-driven, normatively inconsistent self-prophecy effects. Key studies, theoretical explanations, and moderators of each effect are discussed, potential unanswered questions and research opportunities are identified, and significant managerial and policy implications are highlighted.

The importance of customer satisfaction as a critical success factor has been recognized by practitioners and academics for several years now. Although customer satisfaction plays an important role in industrial markets due to their special characteristics, most researchers focus on consumer goods or services, leaving industrial goods fairly uncovered. In order to give manufacturers of industrial goods well-founded recommendations on how to reach a high level of satisfaction, the main drivers of customer satisfaction have to be revealed. The identification of these drivers is the primary goal of this study. Taking into account that there has been a change of paradigms in scale development we created a state-of-the-art questionnaire consisting of 15 constructs to be measured with 52 items, which was administered to respondents in 12 countries worldwide. The drivers’ analysis using Partial-Least-Squares (PLS) reveals a lot of penalty-services, whereas only the quality of machines and the quality of quotations offer a significant chance on increasing customer satisfaction, therefore disagreeing with previous results.

Purpose – Revisiting Fornell et al.'s (1996) seminal study, this chapter looks at the evidence for observed and unobserved heterogeneity within data underlying the American customer satisfaction index (ACSI) model. Examining data for two specific industries (utilities and hotels) reveals only modest differences. However, we suppose that unobserved heterogeneity critically affects the results. These insights provide the basis for shaping further differentiated ACSI model analyses and more precise interpretations.

Methodology/approach – This study applies the partial least squares (PLS) path modeling method and uses empirical data to estimate and compare the ACSI model results on the aggregate and industry-specific data levels. In addition, the finite mixture PLS path modeling (FIMIX-PLS) method is employed to further examine across industry similarities and within industry differences.

Findings – This research uncovers unobserved heterogeneity that guides forming three segments of customers within each industry. The major segment in each industry represents customers that are fairly loyal (i.e., neither disloyal nor extremely loyal) while the other two smaller segments are not as similar across the two industries. Our study identifies substantial differences across these segments within each industry. An importance-performance map analysis illustrates these differences and provides the basis for managerial implications.

Originality/value of the chapter – The unobserved heterogeneity revealed within industries in a given country (i.e., the United States of America) underlines the need to be open to differences within populations, beyond the observed heterogeneity across distinct groups or cultures, and the need to reconsider reporting requirements in academic research.

The philosophical blend of rigor and relevance characteristic of the Michigan State program was instrumental in the development of many who graduated from this institution. The result has been an increase in faculty who understand the multiple constituencies that depend on our work, and look beyond the simple publication records of fellow academics. These constituencies, or stakeholders, include students of all levels, firms, employees/managers/executives, economies, our academies, and our institutions. In other words, it was instilled upon us that our responsibilities went further than incremental contributions to the literature, and in fact we should look at our profession as one that should take ideas from theories and concepts all the way to dissemination in the classroom and application in the field. As a result, we were encouraged to become full portfolio professors: those who can forecast real business problems, develop theories to address those problems, test those theories in a rigorous fashion, and publish the results in the best of the academic journals. Where many other programs would consider this the endpoint of our responsibilities, we were encouraged to extend our efforts to address the needs of all our stakeholders. This could be accomplished in a number of ways, but particularly we were taught to reformulate our writings to address a managerial audience, and to refine our research to provide undergraduate, MBA, and executive audiences with the tools necessary to address the problems they deal with, or would deal with, in their work routines. This perspective not only influenced others outside of the academic world, but also forced us to constantly consider the relevance of our research and avoid an incremental or esoteric research agenda which might fail to provide meaningful solution sets to those managers at the sharp end of the business stick.

The main purpose of this chapter is to investigate whether hotel hospitality mediates and/or moderates the relationships between surprise experience and customer delight in the context of hotel services. This study, involving 300 Malaysian and non-Malaysian hotel guests, employs questionnaire surveys as the main data collection method. The results indicate that there is a strong and positive relationship between surprise and customer delight, and hotel hospitality mediates and also moderates the abovementioned direct relationship.