When birds flock together: an identification of the destination social servicescape

ABSTRACT

While servicescapes have been studied in a variety of travel and tourism domains, the phenomenon has been largely ignored at the destination level. This is especially true when it comes to considerations of the social servicescape, which is reflective of the extent to which the mere presence of other destination visitors can influence affective responses to the destination experience. Accordingly, the purpose of this research is to propose and empirically test a model of the destination social servicescape that explores perceived psychographic similarity within the social servicescape and the effects of this construct on affective evaluations and behavior.

KEYWORDS:

• Social servicescape
• customer-to-customer interaction
• affective destination image
• place attachment
• return intention

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the participants at the 2017 Boston University Consumer Behavior in Hospitality Research Conference for their constructive feedback concerning the research presented in this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.