Investigating the wellness tourism factors in hot spring hotel customer service

Abstract

Purpose – This study aims to establish customer service factors for wellness tourism from both service providers and customer perspectives, and to determine whether gender and age factors affect older tourist opinions of customer service. Design/methodology/approach – The authors interviewed 13 experts in the hot spring hotel industry and more than 469 hot spring hotel visitors who are over 50 years of age. Content validity and homogeneity reliability as proposed by Aiken were used to confirm customer service factors. This study uses the verbal-linguistic evaluation to assess customer service factors and each service item associated with these factors. Findings – Eight crucial customer service factors, from high to low, are personnel services, environments, healthy diet, relaxation, health promotion treatments, experience of unique tourism resources, social activities, and mental learning. Research limitations/implications – This study implicated allocation and management of input resources as the service factors that are used for determining the preferences of older consumers in wellness tourism. Originality/value – Numerous countries are currently facing an aging population and market opportunities for wellness tourism are popular with the tourism industry. Studies show that enhanced customer service increases competitive advantage in the tourism industry. However, customer service differs from what customers prefer. For this study, the authors compiled the viewpoints of older consumers, hotel personnel, and expert opinions in the hotel industry to identify customer-service factors in wellness tourism. The analytical results of this study suggest that hot spring hotels in Taiwan can focus on critical customer-service items, resource management, and resource allocation.

Exploring the Determinants of Hot Spring Tourism Customer Satisfaction: Causal Relationships Analysis Using ISM

“…With the increasing awareness of the value of spa treatments, people began to attach importance to the commercial and economic value of hot springs, particularly the tourism industry, mainly for the behavior and demand characteristics of tourists [18], travel motivations [36,38,42,43], the geographical characteristics of customer marketing [15], as well as visitors' evaluation of spa experiences [44]. In addition to focusing on the value of hot spring resources, researchers later began to discuss the influencing factors of hot spring tourism development, such as hot spring hot brand [45], the coordinated development of the entire region's economy, and ecology at the external macro level [12,15,46,47], while other scholars studied the advantages and disadvantages of hot spring resorts with case analyses [12], focused on services and activities at hot spring destinations [48][49][50], and service quality and consumer preferences [15,22,35,48].…”

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