Feeling at home and being acknowledged: Conceptualising hospitality experience of adults aged 60 and over

Theory-building on the experience of hospitality has stalled at the descriptive stage. Effect-centred research has accumulated experiential dimensions without anchoring them to theory about how affective experience arises or why its salience varies across life stages. This gap is costly for adults aged 60 and over, projected to nearly double by 2050 and for whom evidence indicates a reorganisation of service-experience priorities. We develop an integrative framework in which Socioemotional Selectivity Theory is the explanatory centre: it specifies why emotionally meaningful experiences dominate later life, while Place Attachment Theory and Recognition Theory specify the two registers realising that priority, settled belonging and being acknowledged as a particular person. We explore this through 33 semi-structured interviews with Dutch adults (mean age 77) across home care, senior living, and hotels, analysed with the Gioia methodology. Two dimensions constitute the experience, feeling at home and feeling acknowledged; both are mutually reinforcing and shaped by three antecedents: personal attention, design, and surprise. The paper (i) advances effect-centred theorising from description toward theory-anchored explanation, (ii) specifies a coupling between the registers that we theorise as threat regulation, (iii) reframes ageing as a structured reorganisation of affective priorities, and (iv) articulates five propositions for confirmatory work.