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Our purpose in this study was to provide a clear understanding of spa hotel customers' behavioral intention formation by examining the intricate relationships among quality, emotion (pleasure and arousal), satisfaction, and desire, and their effect on behavioral intention. Participants were 300 customers who had visited a spa hotel and used spa services in South Korea at least once within the past 3 years. Results showed the criticality of 3 spa quality dimensions (tangibility, assurance, and empathy) in eliciting pleasure. In addition, pleasure significantly contributed to improving satisfaction and desire, both of which led to behavioral intention. Results also showed that pleasure, satisfaction, and desire played a crucial mediating role in the theoretical framework. Finally, we successfully built a theoretical framework that efficiently links spa quality → emotion → satisfaction/desire → behavioral intention in a sequential manner.
Keywords
wellness tourism; satisfaction; pleasure; arousal; desire; behavioral intention; spa tourism; spa hotels
Wellness tourism has been gaining increasing worldwide attention over the past few decades (Reddy, York, & Brannon, 2010). It is predicted to grow by more than 9% per year, nearly 50% faster than overall global tourism (Han, Kiatkawsin, Kim, & Lee, 2017). As spa tourism, a popular form of wellness tourism, represents about 41% of wellness tourism expenditure (Han, Kiatkawsin, Jung, & Kim, 2018), it is often referred to as wellness spa tourism by tourism researchers (Han et al., 2017). Spa tourism is the fastest growing sector across the entire tourism industry (Han et al., 2018). Spa hotels lead the trend in the emerging spa tourism sector of the wellness tourism marketplace. Spa hotels are lodging operations that offer individual treatments, massages, and services for spa-seeking patrons whose focus is on health and wellness. Customers' favorable experiences with spa hotels and their postpurchase behavior have received particular attention from researchers and practitioners, because of the tremendous contribution of spa tourism to the growth of wellness tourism (Kiatkawsin & Han, 2017). Thus, marketers in both spa hotels and destinations endeavor to promote spa hotel customers' positive postpurchase behavior (Kiatkawsin & Han, 2017) to fulfill their increasing need for wellness (Ranć, Popov-Ralijć, & Pavić, 2013).
An understanding of the factors that influence spa hotel customers' favorable postpurchase decisions is critical in a competitive international tourism marketplace. Previous...