BE-02

(Oral presentation, session Business and Ethics, 14.10 - 14.30 hrs)

Hospitality is important for services organizations. However, the concept of hospitality is still ill-defined and is consequently difficult to measure. In the first part of a PhD research project the concept of the experience of hospitality was studied, and subsequently the EH-Scale was developed for assessing hospitality in service environments from the customer’s point of view.

The scale development consisted of two phases. Phase one comprised two qualitative studies examining the concept from the viewpoint of the host (study 1, n=8) and from the viewpoint of the guest (study 2, n=89). Phase two aimed for refinement and validation of the scale by administering the scale to 1086 guests at different types of service organizations. Factor Analysis was performed in three steps: item screening (Principal Component Analysis), exploring the underlying structure of the data (Exploratory Factor Analysis) and confirming the underlying structure (confirmatory factor analysis). The result was a thirteen-item scale containing three underlying experiential dimensions of hospitality: inviting, care and comfort.

In the second part of the project, the EH-Scale was used to measure the impact of particular aspects in the servicescape on the experience of hospitality. A first experimental study on the effect of the physical approachability of the entrance of a public university building on the experience of hospitality showed that the perception of visual transparency increased people’s experience of inviting and care. A second study on the effect of physical warmth on the experience of hospitality in a theatre showed that people who were offered a warm drink experienced more care that people who were offered a cold drink.

The authors think that the EH-Scale is the first empirically founded conceptualization and measurement of the experience of hospitality that is 1) applicable to every type of service organization and is 2) not limited to the attitude and behaviour of service staff, but takes a broader perspective.