Do ambient scents in hotel guest rooms affect customers’ emotions?

Abstract

The introduction of ambient scents in different business facilities might be an effective strategy to influence customers’ emotions and, ultimately, their experience. Yet, there is scant evidence on the effects of introducing ambient scents in hotels and, particularly, in hotels’ private areas such as the guest rooms. Accordingly, this study aims to analyse the impact on customers’ positive emotions when a pleasant ambient scent is introduced in a hotel guest room. To this end, a randomized control trial was conducted in a real four-star hotel in Barcelona in which two experimental groups (N=99) were invited to enter and experience a scented guest room and an identical but unscented room, respectively. The happiness level and the emotional valence of the experiment’s participants were measured using a facial recognition technique. This methodological strategy represents one of the significant contributions of the study. The results show that, on average, individuals who entered the scented room were happier and had a better emotional state than individuals who entered the unscented room. These results suggest an important managerial implication for hoteliers who can improve the guests’ experience by implementing a non- expensive action and opens an avenue for future studies on scent marketing in hotels.

Use of Consumer Neuroscience in the Choice of Aromatisation as Part of the Shopping Atmosphere and a Way to Increase Sales Volume

“…It is not enough to use a fragrance that "smells well"; the smell must also be consistent with other factors (e.g., sensory environment) [18]. The consequence of marketing is that fragrances used in retail stores or other venues [19] can not only create pleasure, but they also support specific consumer responses, such as categorization, recall, or choice [20]. Although olfactory marketing has increased its presence in the commercial environment in recent years, the number of scientific studies on this issue is still limited [21].…”

The Use of Scent Within the Changing Landscape of Theatre and Its Application to Long-Term Rehabilitation

“…The financial implications of introducing a scent to a retail environment have been well investigated and the technique has scaled well with time [10]. This practice extends to the hotel industry, where scent marketing also has significant amounts of evidence-based support [11]. Similarly to the desired outcome of performances, the focus of using scent marketing in the hotel industry is to deliberately trigger a desired emotional state within their client base [12].…”

Advances in Aromatization/Aromachology in Different Environments

“…study [99] carried out in a four-star hotel in Barcelona aimed to analyze the effect of the scent used in the hotel room on customers' emotions. The authors chose lavender the scent of the environment for the experiment because it is considered one of the most pleasant scents for humans.…”

“…Table all 33 studies described by us considering indicators (place of experiment, type of aroma used, size of the researched sample of respondents, and researched variables). According to the available resources, we conclude that is probably the most widely used in the HORECA segment's [5,25,[73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81]97,[99][100][101]. We have described the options of using and researching aromachology in the selected types of services above.…”

“…The sample size of respondents in individual surveys varied diametrically from tens of [5,73,77,86,89,92,99] to hundreds of respondents [78][79][80][81]88,90,91,93,94,97,[100][101][102]. limitation of certain studies was the omission of these data [72,82,87], the selection of respondents, e.g., involving only women in the survey [73,94], or carrying out the survey on a sample of students [86,103].…”