Making sense of the hotel guestroom

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the importance of hotel guestroom design in contribution to a ‘guestroom experience’ which underpins guest satisfaction and return patronage decisions, and to what extent hoteliers may be using this element to their own advantage, including the marketing of their product to an increasingly discerning clientele. An exploratory qualitative approach was used: purposively sampled General Managers (N=8) of deluxe hotels primarily in the Asia Pacific region were invited to participate in an e-mail survey/questionnaire. This research showed that ‘sight’ was what hoteliers considered the dominant sense of guests, followed closely by ‘smell’. Contemporary guestrooms appear to be primarily pleasing to the eye and touch with no apparent consideration for smell despite being found to be the second most important determinant of the positive first and lasting impression for guests. All the human senses, encompassing all elements of ‘prosumption’, the connection of production with consumption, should be taken into equal consideration with the purpose of imparting all-round client satisfaction with a guestroom thereby maximising the overall guests' hotel experience. The very small sample of hoteliers in this study does not allow for making generalisation to hotels in the Asia Pacific region. Despite this limitation, the study provides insights into a dimension that hotel developers and hoteliers perceive their accommodation product. This paper examines the hotel guestroom, the core product of a hotel, as the principle determinant of guest stay satisfaction. A holistic approach to guestroom design incorporating all the human senses and beyond the banal structural paradigm is required to optimise the ‘guestroom experience’. The study examines an aspect of hotel management, namely the core product of hotels and arguably it's ‘cash cow’ that to date have received limited attention in academic research. At the same time, the study opens several avenues for future research.