Tourist Experience on Memorable Hospitality Services

ABSTRACT

Social media, online review and photo posting have created an impact on hotel guest experience. This study explores how tourists capture their experience on memorable hospitality services via each stage of the long-term memory system (i.e. encoding, consolidation and retrieval). User-generated content was analyzed from three five-star hotels in Guangdong Province, China, and linked with each stage of the memory system to highlight the concepts of mindfulness, working memory, self-identity, remembering and storytelling on the memories of guests. Among the three stages of the long-term memory system, stage 1-encoding received the highest weight, followed by stage 3-retrieval and stage 2- consolidation. This result corroborates that practitioners can focus on the opportunities of the memory consolidation (stage 2) and retrieval (stage 3) of tourists. From a theoretical perspective, this study contributes by demonstrating how a long-term memory framework derived from psychology research could be used to provide a broad investigation of the memories of guests in hospitality research. Moreover, this study exhibited how the combination of text-based guest reviews and shared photographs of positive and negative memories can be used in memory-related hospitality studies. Hence, this study elucidated how a long-term memory framework could be a relevant reference for hospitality practitioners and researchers.

摘要:

社交媒体、在线评论和上传的照片对酒店客人体验产生了影响。本研究探讨了游客如何根据长期记忆系统（即记忆编码、记忆巩固和记忆回溯）的每一个阶段来记忆酒店服务体验。用户评论和上传的照片数据来自于三家中国广东省的五星级酒店。结合记忆系统各阶段对数据进行分析，突出了注意力集中正念、（短暂）工作记忆、自我认同、记忆和客人讲述回忆等概念。基于长期记忆系统的三个阶段的基础上的分析，阶段1编码获得权重最高，其次是阶段3的回溯记忆和阶段2的巩固记忆。分析结果表明，酒店及接待业从业人员需要专注于记忆巩固（阶段2）和住客回溯记忆（阶段3）。从理论的角度来看，这项研究有助于说明如何运用心理学长期记忆框架，分析酒店客人入住体验的回忆研究。此外，这项研究展示了如何将基于文本的客人评论和上传的照片(包括正面和负面的)记忆相结合，以用于记忆相关的酒店研究。因此，本研究阐明了如何利用长期记忆框架为酒店从业人员和研究者提供相关参考。

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• memory management
• hotel experience
• user-generated online comments

关键词：:

• 社交媒体、记忆管理、酒店体验、用户生成的在线评论

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pearl M. C. Lin

Pearl M.C. Lin is Assistant Professor in the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China (E-mail: [email protected]). She specializes in culinary creativity, training and education, and food and beverage management.

Vincent Wing Sun Tung

Vincent Wing Sun Tung is Assistant Professor in the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China (E-mail: [email protected]). Dr Tung received his MBA and PhD in Tourism Management and Marketing from the University of Calgary in Canada. His research interests include tourism marketing, consumer behavior and corporate social responsibility.

Hanqin Qiu Zhang

Hanqin Qiu Zhang is Professor in the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China (E-mail: [email protected]). Her research interests are in consumer behavior, China’s hotel and tourism development and policy issues. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Quality Assurance in Hospitality and Tourism.

Qiushi Gu

Qiushi Gu is Lecturer in the Department of Tourism Studies of the School of Humanities at Southeast University, Nanjing, China (E-mail: [email protected]). Dr Gu received her PhD from the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include tourism geography, consumer behavior and wine tourism.