One key aspect of the competitive service sector environment is the effort of many businesses to differentiate themselves by creating unique customer experiences that accompany their products and services. The challenge of creating memorable consumer experiences is the proper identification of specific characteristics that influence experiences and gaining a better understanding of how these affect consumers’ perceived value. To this end, this study attempted to develop a model that identifies influencing dimensions of consumer experiences and investigates the composition of consumer experiences and the relative outcome on consumers’ perceived value in a hospitality setting.
To initiate this study, an intercept survey approach was taken. The results revealed that both the physical environment and the human interactions have a significant and positive relationship with perceived value. These results can give lodging managers a better understanding of the composition of consumer experiences and how these events influence perceived value.
Nearly 50 years ago, futurist Toffler (1970) pointed to a paradigm shift that would deeply affect goods and services in the future and lead to the economy's next forward movement. He called the strange new sector “experience industries” (Knutson et al., 2006). An experience or experience dimension, for the purposes of this study, is a blend of many individual elements that come together (Shaw and Ivens, 2002) that may involve the consumer emotionally, physically, and intellectually (Mossberg, 2007). Examples of experience dimensions may include physical surroundings (Wakefield and Blodgett, 1996), social surroundings (Arnould and Price, 1993), and other consumers (Silkapit and Fisk, 1985). Carlson (1997) postulated that an experience can be characterized as a steady flow of thoughts and feelings that take place during moments of consciousness regarding experience dimensions. However, an organization cannot grant an experience to the consumer; rather, organizations can only create the environment and the circumstances in which consumers could have an experience (Mossberg, 2007). In other words, the experiences that consumers encounter occur inside them, and the outcome or consumer experience depends on how the consumers, based on a specific situation or state of mind, react to the staged encounters (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, Mossberg, 2007, Pine and Gilmore, 1999 and Wang, 2002).
The place where experiences of pleasure, enjoyment, and entertainment can be encountered, as well as where human interactions occur, was termed the “experiencescape” by O’Dell (2005). No longer are consumers merely inert purchasers but, rather, co-producers who actively build their own consumer experiences through the interaction between the environment, seller, and other consumers (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2003). This study principally looks at experience design and the specific elements that compose the design, not the possible experience outcomes (i.e., product branding).
The principal aim of this study was to investigate the concept of consumer experience and its role in influencing hotel guests’ perceived value. The first objective was to determine which specific items comprised the PE and HI constructs. The second objective was to investigate the relationship between consumer perceptions of PE and HI and perceived value in a hotel setting. A model was developed based on the literature that proposed that hotel-based experiences were comprised physical environment and human interactions, which, in turn, affected consumers’ perceived value.
