The nature of hospitality: Customer perceptions and implications

This paper presents a critical review of the results from a pilot study designed to explore the validity of a data collection instrument and procedure, based upon the use of associative and metaphorical projection techniques, as a vehicle for generating hotel guest perceptions of the physical and service aspects of hospitality within given hospitality environments. The pilot study was undertaken in two case-study UK hotels where 89 face-to-face interviews were conducted using a pre-designed questionnaire. The results from this include the words guests most associate with ‘hospitality’ in genera, the colour, animal and season of the year they used to describe both the physical and service aspects of the hospitality they encountered in the case-study hotels, and the reasons why they chose these. In addition, the results also explore whether any relationship between these choices and a range of respondent variables, e.g. gender, age, educational level, ethnicity, occupational type, nature of stay, etc., should be hypothesized and tested in future studies. The results are also examined in relation to the operational definition of hospitality posited by Brotherton (2002) that suggests the hospitality concept is comprised of four basic dimensions – physical, temporal, behavioural and spatial.