Content area
Full text
Introduction
The concept of “experience” in the hospitality industry is generally used in the context of products and services provided by businesses, such as agencies, restaurants or hotels where services are commonly used (Dong and Siu, 2013). However, evaluation of services is quite difficult, due to their non-physical nature (Reimer and Kuehn, 2005). Although many studies have been conducted to determine the effective factors of service-based experiences (Grace and O’Cass, 2004), findings are still not precisely clear (Dong and Siu, 2013). Servicescape includes not only substantive components, such as decor and design, but also communicative ones, such as politeness, concern and culture delivery. Accordingly, specific outcomes regarding service experiences can be assured. Servicescape can therefore be used as a tool for making experience evaluations of customers easier (Namasivayama and Lin, 2008). Lee (2011) furthermore emphasizes the necessity for the hotel industry to use different components of servicescape, such as ambiance, service, convenience, decor and design, to be competitive within the market.
In the literature, such components as ambiance, decor and design have been examined within the framework of SSoS (Bitner, 1992; Kim and Moon, 2009). While servicescape plays an effective role in customers’ purchase-based decision-making processes by leading their behaviors (Rapoport, 1982), it has been found that it may also affect their image perceptions (LeBlanc and Nguyen, 1996; Lin, 2004; Nguyen, 2006). On the one hand, image can have an effect on customer preferences (Jenkins, 1999), and on the other hand, it may lead people who have positive image perceptions to prefer the same product, business or region (Mayo, 1975).
Fakeye and Crompton (1991) indicated that image perceptions of tourists may change after having experienced a destination. Sönmez and Graefe (1998) stated that perceived risks of products may decrease with the help of tourists’ past experiences. Therefore, when the facilitative effect of servicescape components on experience evaluation is taken into consideration (Namasivayama and Lin, 2008), customer experiences and retained images may encourage customers to obtain more information about a product, business or region, so as to make comparisons between other competitors and avoid unexpected risks. Paralleling this, it can be expected that customers having positive image perceptions after their experiences demonstrate positive behavioral intentions.
When the tourism literature was investigated, it was seen that image-based...