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The market for luxury is growing rapidly. While there is a significant body of literature on luxury goods, academic research has largely ignored luxury services. The purpose of this article is to open luxury services as a new field of investigation by developing the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings to build the luxury services literature and show how luxury services differ from both luxury goods and from ordinary (i.e. non-luxury) services.

This paper uses a conceptual approach drawing upon and synthesizing the luxury goods and services marketing literature.

This article makes three contributions. First, it shows that services are largely missing from the luxury literature, just as the field of luxury is mostly missing from the service literature. Second, it contrasts the key characteristics of services and related consumer behaviors with luxury goods. The service characteristics examined are non-ownership, IHIP (i.e. intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability, and perishability), the three additional Ps of services marketing (i.e. people, processes, and physical facilities) and the three-stage service consumption model. This article derives implications these characteristics have on luxury. For example, non-ownership increases the importance of psychological ownership, reduces the importance of conspicuous consumption and the risk of counterfeiting. Third, this article defines luxury services as extraordinary hedonic experiences that are exclusive whereby exclusivity can be monetary, social and hedonic in nature, and luxuriousness is jointly determined by objective service features and subjective customer perceptions. Together, these characteristics place a service on a continuum ranging from everyday luxury to elite luxury.

This article provides suggestions on how firms can enhance psychological ownership of luxury services, manage conspicuous consumption, and use more effectively luxury services' additional types of exclusivity (i.e. social and hedonic exclusivity).

This is the first paper to define luxury services and their characteristics, to apply and link frameworks from the service literature to luxury, and to derive consumer insights from these for research and practice.

Purpose – The purpose of this study was to explore Chinese consumers’ motivations for purchasing luxury products, and to unravel the interrelationships among individual differences, motives, and luxury consumption.

Methodology – Data were collected from general consumers living in a large cosmopolitan city of China. A total of 473 questionnaires provided usable data and were analyzed using SPSS.

Findings – Eight motives were identified: self-actualization, product quality, social comparison, others’ influence, investment for future, gifting, special occasions, and emotional purchasing. Results showed that personal income, age, the motives of gifting, others’ influence, and product quality were significant predictors of luxury spending. Younger consumers, who did not typically make plans before buying, were more likely to buy luxury products out of emotion and less likely to do so for self-actualization or future investment.

Research limitations – The conceptualization and operationalization of some concepts used in this study (e.g., luxury brands, luxury consumption, and motives) may not be robust. Social desirability bias could comprise the validity of some research findings.

Originality – Despite a large body of research on luxury consumption, to date, most studies have been conducted in Western developed countries. Past research has showed that the symbolic and social values related to luxury consumption are deeply embedded in culture. As such, it is meaningful to investigate luxury consumption in China, whose culture is vastly different from the West.

This study aims to contribute by forming the concept of luxury hotel brand (four- and five-star hotel) coolness and revealing its promoting role to customer brand engagement with brand satisfaction and brand love as connecting components and materialism as a contingent factor.

A conditional model linking luxury hotel brand coolness and customer brand engagement is proposed and tested using the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) technique on a data set of 284 customers.

Luxury hotel brand coolness reflecting various brand qualities fosters satisfaction and love, which facilitate CBE. Materialism positively moderates the impact of luxury hotel brand coolness on brand satisfaction and love.

Future studies should further generalize the findings by extending the current research on different hospitality services and luxury consumption. Also, more personality traits and personal values should be investigated as moderators.

Luxury hotel brand management should place brand coolness at the center of luxury hotel brand strategies.

This study fills in the gap of unraveling the central role of luxury hotel brand coolness in fostering customer brand engagement with brand satisfaction and love as catalysts and materialism as a contingent condition.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the luxury accommodation experience is created by investigating the perceptions of the three main participant groups – managers, employees and guests – using case studies from New Zealand.

An interpretivist case-study methodology was used. Eighty-one participants were interviewed (27 managers, 27 employees and 27 guests) from six luxury properties. Thematic analysis was conducted to inform the results.

The key themes identified in creating the luxury accommodation experience are: setting the stage; the ethos of the property; performances of the actors; and co-creation between the participants. Using the themes identified, a conceptual model of the creation of the luxury accommodation experience has been formulated.

The conceptual model can be used to assist managers to deliver a more positive and memorable experience of their properties. Strategies to enhance the luxury accommodation experience include: training; standards of procedure; staff incentives; and the use of effective communication tools.

This study identified the three alternative perspectives of managers, employees and guests regarding how the luxury accommodation experience is created. The luxury accommodation sector contributes to the economies of a number of nations and therefore it is important to highlight how it can be maintained and improved.

This study aims to determine whether the branded luxury guestroom amenities provided in five-star hotels of Delhi influence the guest's hotel purchase decisions. It also identified the amenities which are found to be most and least influential in affecting the guest's hotel selection and purchase behaviour. The study was conducted in the three upscale five-star hotels of Delhi. The selection of amenities and brands to be considered as luxury was based upon three focus group interviews with the room's division manager of the hotels. A structured questionnaire was drafted to identify the most and least useful hotel amenities among the respondents, influencing their hotel selection and purchase behaviours. Wi-Fi in the guestroom was found to be the most valuable amenity, with stationery items regarded as least valuable. It was also found that the guest's hotel selection and purchase decisions were significantly influenced when luxury branded amenities were placed in the guestroom. Guests were even found to pay extra when the hotel provided access to luxury branded amenities in the guestrooms. This is a novel attempt to find how the guests' hotel selection and purchase intentions are influenced by the placement of branded luxury amenities in guestrooms.

Delivering services that create memorable luxury accommodation experiences rely on frontline staff to engage guests on a sensory level rather than merely a functional one. This engagement includes cognitive, emotional, relational and behavioural. Hospitality and tourism industries are people-orientated – people are needed to serve people in order to create desired experiences – and it is very difficult to create satisfaction or to revisit intention in every interaction that takes place. It is this intangible characteristic of the industries, provisions and tangible cues that play an important part in enhancing the overall luxury accommodation experience. Guests are very clear as to what they expect from luxury accommodation experiences: they feel that they are paying for a service that should be personalised, and that staff should realise what they want and need. The human interaction component and the co-creation that occurs between staff and guests is an essential dimension of the industry. The influence of these interactions on guest experiences and the delivery of services will be explored in this chapter.

This chapter treats the luxury hotel concept and practice and its recent trends in the tourism industry. This niche market is expanding rapidly with changing global income structures and increasing complexity of the hospitality sector. Its clientele comprises quality-seeking, prestige-striving, and high-spending customers. The chapter first explores the concept of luxury in relation to hotels. It further groups various associated assets into tangibles and intangibles to discuss their recent trends across the world. It is suggested that companies and destinations active in the luxury hotel market or contemplating entry take these trends into account to gain and/or maintain competitiveness.

The growth of luxury tourism has been brought to a grinding halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic affecting most parts of the world since early 2020. Although the time for recovery of hospitality and tourism industries is still unclear, experience from the SARS outbreak in 2003 showed that the bounce back from consumers could be fast. The group of most affluent consumers, mostly known as HNWIs (high net worth individuals), will resume their original consumption behaviour much sooner than the rest of the market; these affluent consumers are the main target market of luxury hospitality and tourism industries.

This chapter presents different types of luxury tourism, luxury lifestyle, luxury tourists' decision-making and luxury hospitality products. The luxury food and beverage business in Singapore is presented to illustrate the commercial environment during the pandemic.

This chapter explores in-depth the particularities of the luxury travel industry during the coronavirus pandemic. The chapter begins with a literature review on the concept of the experience referred to as luxury travel, followed by a brief overview of the measures adopted globally in the tourism sector for the prevention of COVID-19. Due to the impact of the crisis, high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) have changed their motivations, preferences and behaviour. To meet the new demands prompted by the pandemic, the luxury travel industry has adopted a wide range of strategies that have been classified into three groups: (1) reducing new moments of friction; (2) experiencing protection and (3) building new memorable experiences. A selection of examples from the luxury travel industry illustrates each category. The chapter ends with a case study that describes the strategy adopted by Fiji to respond to the pandemic. The manner in which Fiji has tackled the pandemic may be inspiring for other tourism-dependent destinations as Fiji has been able to protect the health and safety of the inhabitants of its islands while preserving the local economy, which relies on tourism.

This paper aims to understand the effect of food and beverage (F&B) services on the operating performance of luxury hotels and to identify the heterogeneous effects of the luxury hotels’ F&B operation on the business performance between Asia and the USA.

Operating performance of luxury hotels in Asia (37 hotels), including Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong and in the USA (72 hotels), including New York, California, Florida, Illinois and Texas was collected from STR reports. This study applied generalized estimating equations models to reach the conclusions.

The emphasis on F&B services exhibits a significant positive effect on the operating performance of luxury hotels in Asia. The occupancy rate and gross operating profit per available room of luxury hotels in Asia have improved with the investment in F&B offerings. Therefore, a distinctive F&B offering should be considered as one of the main products and services rather than a supplementary service in Asia. While devotion to F&B services lacks a significant positive effect on luxury hotels in the USA.

This study is the first effort to identify the importance of luxury hotels’ F&B operation for the overall hotel performance in Asia and the USA by focusing on the entire industry’s operating information.