Experience quality has been studied for many decades in various contexts. While understanding of experience quality has advanced, its context-specific and multi-dimensional nature has challenged its conceptualisation. With the rise of experiential accommodation in tourism and hospitality, luxury lodges have been increasingly recognised in the industry and by customers as the emblem of luxury experiences, albeit receiving limited scholarly attention. Through a qualitative multiple-case study methodology, utilising high-engagement research techniques, this study explores the dimensions and determinants of luxury lodge experience quality. The study presents an experience quality model grounded in empirical data, bridging various experience quality theoretical perspectives to explain the luxury lodge experience, and demonstrating generalisation capabilities for other service contexts. The study contributes to the ongoing discourse on experience quality, particularly in the context of small luxury accommodation. The study also offers important practical implications for luxury accommodation operators on designing, staging and managing quality experiences.
This study explores the negotiation process underpinning the creation of authentic experiences in luxury lodges. The findings of this study highlight how this is a balancing act performed by the hosts through the provision of an authentic experiential platform connecting guests with unique places and genuine people and is of a luxurious nature. Staged experiences are authenticated by the guests through their bodies and minds, activating, in turn, experiences of existential authenticity. Contributing to service marketing and management literature, the study departs from purely abstract authenticity conceptualisations by applying an experience design and management lens to understanding authentic experiences. Practically, our findings demonstrate how authenticity is operationalised in luxury lodges and how these experiences are understood and valued by tourism and hospitality consumers and providers, providing crucial implications for luxury accommodation marketers and managers.
While luxury accommodation experience research has increased in the last decade, the field shows little accumulation of knowledge over time, requiring further foundational development. This study presents a meta-ethnographic synthesis of sixteen qualitative studies to propose a new conceptualisation of the luxury accommodation experience. The study follows Noblit and Hare (1988) seven-steps methodology for the interpretative synthesis of qualitative empirical studies, an under-utilised methodology introduced by Smit, Melissen, Font, and Gkritzali (2020) in tourism and hospitality research. The synthesis model highlights the emotional, multi-dimensional and process-driven nature of the luxury accommodation experiences, created by guests, hosts, and external others through the social interaction occurring within a physical and sensorial environment and influenced by personal and situational factors. The synthesis also underlines three factors characterising the luxury accommodation experience, congruence, culture, and collaboration, providing a foundational framework to advance hospitality luxury experience research. Implications for practitioners are also highlighted.
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This proposal originates from a pilot of the ‘Frontrunners coalition’ on initiatives for the Circular Economy at the city level. This spin off project studies strategizing in hotels, to find innovative solutions how to manage the integration of circularity in the overall business strategy. The theoretical innovation is to better understand the strategizing process by using the theoretical framework of “strategy-as-practices (S-as-P)”. Exploring in two cases the daily challenges of implementing principles of the circular economy at a luxury and a budget hotel (group). The “strategy-as-practices (S-as-P) framework will be used, emphasizing that strategizing is a joint process of (higher) management and other practitioners (within and outside of the company). The data collection and analysis will be executed by Bachelor and Master students of Hotelschool the Hague and faculty of the research centre. The stages of the Design Oriented Research Approach will be used in this project, with a focus on the stages of Analysis & Diagnoses and Solution Design. The hotels will facilitate this research by giving access and support to the operations and (formal) meetings and additional primary data collection. (Small teams of) Student researchers collect qualitative data based on interviews and observations: they will ‘blend’ in during a 10-week period. Faculty of Hotelschool The Hague will safeguard the continuity and alignment in the project in the several rounds in which these steps are executed. The finding will be presented to the participating companies, the coalition in Amsterdam and the Hospitality industry. Direct societal impact is the showcasing of potential initiative and the responsibility of organizations towards circularity in their environment. Another result is the proposal for a larger follow-up project. This larger project will continue this study within a broader set of hotels but will also be studying and developing potential interventions for improvement the strategizing process.
