عناصر محیط خدمت، تمایل‌های مشتری و تجربه خدمت: موردکاوی بازدیدکنندگان از پارک تفریحی مربوط به موضوعی خاص

As the demand grows for customized services, so too the management of those experiences becomes more important. This study examines the relationship between service environment, customer predisposition and service experience evaluation. Based on data derived from 366 visitors to two theme parks in Hong Kong, a link was found between the servicescape and tourist evaluation through the moderating effects of customer predispositions. Consequently, both the substantive and communicative aspects of the servicescape reliably predicted visitors' evaluations. In addition, a visitor's predisposition to fantasize and/or participate was found to influence the ability of servicescape elements to shape a favorable service experience. Theoretical contributions of this research are elucidated. Moreover, managerial implications related to servicescape design, promotion strategies and service experience enhancement are discussed.

Previous tourism studies have highlighted the role of service quality in determining visitors' satisfaction with the tourism services. However, tourism researchers and practitioners have not paid equal attention to another related and critical factor, namely the customer's service experience (Otto & Ritchie, 2000). Service experience is a customer's subjective cognitive and affective response to a particular service encounter (Verhoef et al., 2009). Tailoring and enhancing the consumer's service experience has become an important component in the development of better service, particularly in the context of experiential services. The tourism industry is a major pillar of the world economy, and in some economies theme parks make a major contribution. The United States amusement park industry provides jobs for approximately 500,000 year-round and seasonal employees and generated $12 billion in revenues in 2007 (International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions [IAAPA], 2012). In Hong Kong, the two major theme parks (Disneyland Resort Hong Kong and Hong Kong Ocean Park) brought about HK$15 billion (approximately US$ 2 billion) of value added to Hong Kong in fiscal year 2011, which is equivalent to around 0.9% of Hong Kong's GDP (The Government of Hong Kong Website [GovHK], 2011). Milman (2001) predicts that attractions such as theme parks will continue to prosper, as they are associated with new and diverse vacation experiences and offer the convenience of on-site accommodation, food services, recreation, shopping and other tourist services in addition to their core recreational and entertainment activities. In response to this trend, recent research has discussed the theoretical underpinnings of the customer experience (Edvardsson, Enquist, & Johnson, 2005; Patrício, Fisk, Cunha, & Constantine, 2011) and empirically examined the effect of experiential value on customer satisfaction in service encounters (Ding, Hu, Verma, & Wardell, 2010). Service researchers generally define the service experience as “all aspects of the production, delivery, and creation of value considered from the customer's perspective” (Ostrom et al., 2010). But researchers' conceptualizations of the customer service experience have been inconsistent (Ostrom et al., 2010; Verhoef et al., 2009) and, more importantly, how customers' predispositions influence their evaluations of a service experience has not yet been elucidated. This despite the fact that many firms providing tourism services in, for example, heritage tourism are putting the management of the customer service experience at the top of their agenda (Chen & Chen, 2010; Rojas & Camarero, 2008). The present study was designed to examine empirically the customer service experience at a theme park. It tested a conceptual model of the service experience which incorporates both servicescape elements and customer predispositions to explain customers' evaluations of a service experience and the subsequent consequences. It explored the following questions: (1) How does the substantive and communicative staging of a servicescape influence visitors' evaluations of the service experience? (2) How do customer predispositions influence the relationship between servicescape elements and those evaluations? and (3) How do the evaluations influence visitors' behavior?