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Introduction
Understanding the consumer is crucial to success in the hospitality industry (Goeldner et al., 2000). Consumer motivation has often been scrutinized in terms of customer decision making, satisfaction, experiences, environment and interactions with others, and hotel management staff are taught that all decisions about management of the hotel should begin with understanding of the guest and determination of which option “favors success for the hotel as the policy most likely to produce a high measure of guest satisfaction” (p. 374). Satisfaction is understood to be predicted by service quality (Sudin, 2011), and Nasution and Mavondo (2005) concluded that the hotel sector should focus especially on providing quality service with respect to the factors of perceived quality that are the most important to customers.
While service quality and satisfaction are important throughout the hotel industry, they are nowhere more important than in luxury properties, where guest expect high quality (Dubois et al., 2005). Dubois and Laurent (1994) showed that consumers associate luxury with words such as “upscale”, “quality” and “class”. Given that the twenty-first century is an era of globalization, luxury and luxury goods now travel through all cultures; however, Wong and Ahuvia (1998) suggested that in East Asian societies, luxuries play a predominantly social symbolic role, minimizing their private meanings and hedonic value, which are emphasized in the West.
When it comes to luxury, service quality and satisfaction, positive customer experiences are vitally important, because a positive experience will cause the customer to wish to return or stay longer and to recommend the establishment to others (Nasution and Mavondo, 2008). In addition, the Internet and social media make it easier than ever for customers to describe and share their satisfaction or dissatisfaction, thus influencing others (Ekiz et al., 2012). As a result, hotel operators must concentrate on the quality of every detail of service encountered by their guests (Su, 2004), and the customers’ emotional judgments about their hotel stays become the basis for the companies’ efforts to differentiate themselves from competitors and achieve competitive advantages (Chang and Horng, 2010).
Homburg et al. (2005) found significant cultural differences in the impact of the factors on customer beliefs about service quality and therefore satisfaction. In addition, Walls et al. (2011) performed a...