Factors Influencing Hotel Consumers’ Health

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1		Yanan Jia	--	1989	2024-03-09 02:51:41	\|
2	Reference format revised.	Lindsay Dong	Meta information modification	1989	2024-03-11 02:42:03	\|

This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/su16052099

The health experience is a crucial component of the customer experience that must not be overlooked. The sustainable development of the hospitality industry is affected by consumers’ health experiences in many aspects.

consumer experience hotel consumers consumers health

1. Introduction

The phenomenon of the experience economy has already pervaded several aspects of daily life and has steadily infiltrated diverse domains ^[1]. Pine and Gilmore ^[1] pointed out that the experience economy emerged after the service economy, and the main measurement criterion for products in the service economy is “delivery-focused”. The experience economy extends the standard for measuring product value from the customer’s perspective in both directions. That is, it expands the breadth of time for a product to realise its value and the depth of its meaning ^[2].

Consumer experience refers to the spontaneous reaction of consumers after being stimulated by products ^[3]. As the industry changes over time, new perspectives continue to emerge ^[4]. As the concept of experience continues to be segmented, research on consumer experience has shown a highly personalised development trend ^[4]. However, the growth of segmentation research has not only resulted in fragmented concepts and research perspectives ^[3] but also resulted in the neglect of consumers’ basic experiences.

Peppers and Rogers ^[5] pointed out that responding to consumers’ basic needs is a key element in consumer experience management. This perspective has been clearly illustrated in some incidents that have occurred in recent years. For example, during the COVID-19 period, the health experiences of hotel consumers were recognised as an important factor in their overall experiences ^[6].

Understanding and improving the health experiences of hotel consumers is not only beneficial to the customers but also to the sustainable development of the hotel industry. Firstly, from the perspective of sustainable industrial economic development, satisfying consumers’ health experiences can promote industrial economic development by influencing consumer loyalty and satisfaction ^[7], which, in turn, is conducive to the formation of an ecosystem in the hotel industry driven by health awareness. Furthermore, industry managers should realize that health-related issues are not only relevant to the industry but also closely related to the sustainable development of humankind. Among the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) proposed by the United Nations, human health ranks third ^[8].

2. Factors Influencing Hotel Consumers’ Health

2.1. Sources of Impact on Hotel Consumers’ Health

According to social cognitive theory, individuals interact with their environments through their cognition and behaviour and are ultimately influenced by both personal and environmental factors ^[9]. Based on this theory, the researchers began the process of drawing the framework presented in Figure 1 by considering whether the influences mentioned in the article came from the consumers themselves or from the environment (i.e., hotels and special events).

Figure 1. Impact sources and processes.

From the perspective of consumers, their inherent demographic characteristics (e.g., gender) are some of the sources that affect their health ^[10]. In addition, influencing factors from consumers also include some characteristics related to personal health, such as their basic health status before they stay in a hotel ^[11] and individual health literacy levels ^[12]. The impact of hotels on consumers mainly comes from three aspects, namely, the services, products, and hotel environment. These features are placed in nonoverlapping areas because these are basic features of the hotel and will not be affected by consumers or special events. Hotel products refer to the tangible products provided by hotels, including products for consumers to use, such as linens ^[13] and bathtubs ^[14]. They also include food and drinks (e.g., milk) provided to consumers by hotels ^[15]. Hotel services refer to the intangible products provided by hotels to consumers. Such products are usually considered to be an important impact source of hotel consumers’ experiences ^[16]. Services not only refer to reception services provided by employees ^[17] but also include some other types of services. For example, hotels provide health information services to consumers ^[18], leisure and health services ^[19], and just health services ^[20]. The hotel environment includes both the visual atmosphere inside and outside, such as the green atmosphere of indoor and outdoor spaces ^[21]^[22] and a sense of ecological design ^[10]. Hotel environment factors also include air quality ^[23], water quality ^[24], social environments ^[17], and acoustic environments ^[11]. These factors are not visually noticeable but will affect consumers when they enter the hotel space.

2.2. Hotel Consumers’ Health

Before explaining the ways in which these sources affect consumers’ health, it is necessary to understand what dimensions of consumers’ health are affected. The World Health Organization points out that health should not only be limited to a person’s physical health but also include an individual’s mental health and social health ^[25]. Therefore, when conducting this thematic analysis of the literature, the relevant outcome variables and conclusions were organised and analysed based on the three dimensions of physical health, mental health, and social health. There are some conclusions or results that represent the overall health status of consumers that cannot be divided into specific dimensions, so this part is considered according to total health. In addition, there are also a few factors that are related to health but do not belong to any of the three dimensions, such as health awareness and health behaviour. Although these factors do not belong to the health status dimension, existing research points out that these contents belong to the health literacy dimension ^[26]. Health literacy is very important to an individual’s health status ^[27]. Therefore, health literacy is also separately counted.

In the past five years, researchers have tried to explore the impact of every aspect of consumers’ health status from multiple perspectives. Mental health consists of multiple factors, such as emotions, thinking skills, moods, and psychological functions ^[28]. Most of the existing studies have measured consumers’ mental health through their emotions. For example, Han and Hyun ^[29] measured the impact of the hotel environment on consumers’ mental health by determining the alleviation of consumers’ anxiety or worry during their stays. The emotional level is an important representative of the mental health level. Most psychological self-rating scales include emotion-related items, such as the Depression and Anxiety Self-Rating Scale ^[30]. Therefore, using emotional status to reflect consumer mental health status is one of the most common methods. Mental health not only includes the current mental state but also includes appropriate self-psychological adjustment capabilities.

Physical health refers to the health of an individual’s physiological system, that is, the healthy state of the body’s systems and organs in operation and function ^[31]. Compared with the research perspective on mental health, the research perspective on physical health is richer. This is because, compared with mental states, the body has many different observable responses to external stimuli, which are also easy to record. Fleming et al. ^[32] found that hotel living environments reduce the frequency of illness in homeless populations by comparing follow-up visits recorded in the healthcare system for homeless populations living in hotels and those not living in hotels. In addition to this indirect way of obtaining health information, researchers can also directly obtain this information with surveys, determining whether they have diarrhoea ^[33], asthma ^[34], or sleep disorders ^[11] during their stay. In addition to the above already-detectable health states, this study also classified a portion of potential physical health states into this category during its analyses. The first reason is that infectious diseases have a direct negative impact on an individual’s physical health. Secondly, some infectious diseases have an incubation period. Although consumers may not show symptoms while staying in a hotel, they may become carriers of the germs in the hotel. Humans have evolved the instinct to identify infection risks during the evolution process ^[35], so their perceived infection risks represent, to a certain extent, the probability of a virus being attached to the body.

Social health refers to a balanced relationship between an individual and his or her social environment, namely, the establishment and maintenance of healthy social interactions ^[36]. Three of the studies in the data set focused on the social health of the general hotel consumer population, with two of the studies centred on specific consumer groups.

2.3. Impact of Hotels on Consumers’ Health

Figure 2 shows the relationship between influencing factors and consumers’ health in terms of both the primary and secondary themes of influencing sources. The left side of Figure 2 shows the primary theme of influencing factors, and the same horizontal position on the right side represents the secondary classification under this theme. The numbers behind each concept represent the frequency with which the concept has been verified to be related to other variables in the data set. The width of the curve connecting each concept represents the frequency of the association that has been proven to exist in this study. The wider the curve, the more times the association has been proven to exist.

Figure 2. A framework of factors influencing hotel consumers’ health.

As can be seen from Figure 2, the collected studies prove that factors originating from hotels have an impact on all aspects of consumers’ health. From the identified themes, it was found that consumers mainly interact with hotel resources through perception, decision-making, and behaviour. It should be noted that, when consumers stay in a hotel, they will inevitably interact with hotel resources regardless of whether they actively use hotel resources or not. Therefore, the ways in which hotels impact consumers’ health can be divided into two categories: intentional and unintentional. From a perceptual perspective, when consumers enter the hotel, they have already begun to be affected by the overall atmosphere of the hotel even before they start using the product. For example, when consumers perceive the green atmosphere inside and outside the hotel, they gain pleasant emotions and feelings of relaxation ^[29]^[37]. It is worth noting that this relationship between consumer mental health and the hotel environment is verified most frequently in Figure 2, and most of the factors are about the positive impact of the hotel atmosphere on consumers’ mental health through unconscious interactive processes. From a behavioural perspective, consumers always perform some necessary unintentional behaviours.

Consumers’ intentional perception of hotel resources includes consumers’ further evaluation of the environment and hotel products. This kind of evaluation mainly includes the judgement of quality and the judgement of self-benefit. When consumers feel that they have benefited from the consumption process, they will generate pleasant emotions, thus improving their immediate mental health ^[22]^[38]. The service quality perceived by consumers will also affect consumers’ physical health.

2.4. Impact of Special Events and Consumer Characteristics on Consumers’ Health

COVID-19 served as the only special event identified during thematic analysis. This special event both directly and indirectly affects consumers’ health. For example, COVID-19-related information and infection risks perceived by consumers will not only affect consumers’ mental health statuses during their stays but also affect their health behaviours ^[39]. It is important to note that consumer-perceived disease information and health risks are not necessarily acquired during a hotel stay. The impact of special events on consumers’ health is not limited to the frequency mentioned in Figure 2. The number presented in the figure represents only the frequency with which the relationship between the two concepts in the studies was verified, that is, the number of times this direct relationship was mentioned. During this special event, some hotels served consumers as quarantine places. These specific services arising from special backgrounds affect consumers’ health experience. When hotels are used as quarantine places, consumers are not only severely restricted in their activity space but they are also unable to enjoy the same basic reception and catering services as usual ^[32].

Based on the triadic interaction proposed in social cognition theory ^[9]^[40], consumers, as the main subjects of the entire influence process, are affected by both individual factors and the environment simultaneously. First of all, through the analysis of the impact of hotels and special events, it can be seen that, before these external events affect consumers’ health, consumers need to have intentional or unintentional perceptual or behavioural interactions with them. In addition to the interaction between consumers and resources playing a role in the above influencing process, there are some inherent characteristics of consumers that affect their health experiences when they stay in a hotel.

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Yanan Jia

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Peihua Shi

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