Abstract
For the initial development of the theory of lodging, the focus was on guest behavior in a hotel room. The theory is expanded to encompass the guest behavior in the entire hotel facility, including entrance into the lobby, private usage of the room, and time spent in such areas as the restaurant, lounge, gift shop, gym, spa, function rooms, and so on. The theory began with the observed differences in human behavior while at home versus during an overnight stay at a commercial lodging establishment. Further consideration is given to the guest behavior inside the public spaces of a hotel, which is beyond the privacy of the guest room but still within the protective boundary of the hotel building itself, and which is all a part of the lodging experience.
Introduction
Hospitality is a ritual filled with oppositions requiring both a guest and a host who each come to the experience with levels of both trust and suspicion (Lynch, Germann Molz, McIntosh, Lugosi, & Lashley, 2011; Sandoval-Strausz, 2007). The current-day English words, hospitality, host, guest, and hotel have their origins from the Latin words, hospes and hostis. Paradoxically, the words stranger and enemy are also derived from the Latin hostis. Hosts are confronted with unknown guests, who may be potentially hostile, yet hosts are expected to welcome these guests into their premise and community. At the same time, guests are in a foreign, unfamiliar land and yet must trust their hosts enough to eat and sleep in their premises.
As long as humans have been travelers, regardless of their host’s religious persuasion, there have been places of refreshment and refuge to welcome them (Lashley, 2016; Lashley & Morrison, 2000; Sandoval-Strausz, 2007). Well before the Roman Empire, inns were common stopping places for travelers. By the 1760s, the word, “hotel,” had become a part of the English language. It was derived from the French word hôtel, a term for a nobleman’s grand home. In English, the term evolved into meaning a high-quality guesthouse.
In the mid-1800s, due to the development of the railroads and decreased working hours for the middle and upper middle classes, the hotel became established as a social institution. It was a place where leisure could be conspicuously enjoyed by an increasingly growing number of consumers (Matthias, 2004). Hotels became arenas where the grand and the inspiring-to-be grand classes could see and be seen. Hotels often assumed the role of status symbols. To be the guest of a prestigious hotel indicated a person’s socioeconomic situation. Guests came to enjoy a hotel’s never-ending experiences; a meeting spot for the exchange of services, goods, and information.
The lodging industry continued to develop in the United States, particularly after the 1921 Federal Aid Highway act granted $75 million to improve the country’s road systems (Jakle, Sculle, & Rogers, 1996). By 1950, there were 28 recognized names on the federal highway guide for hotels and motels (with the word “motel” created from a contraction of the words motor and hotel). The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 (U.S. Public Law 84-627) led to further investment in the national roadway system, creating the vast Interstate Highway System that connected all corners of the continental United States. This significantly increased the mobility of the American traveler, which resulted in the need for more lodging facilities.
These affordable way stations continued to expand the lodging experience to an even larger group of consumers than ever before. Hotels and motels were more than just places to sleep. They were places where many travelers watched their first color television, used their first coffee maker, and experienced their first shag carpet.
Innkeepers common law is a series of legal precedents that govern running hotels (Bell, 2009; Pritchard & Morgan, 2006; Sandoval-Strausz, 2007). This body of rules applies to inns, taverns, motels, and hotels and is broken into three categories known as the holy trinity of hospitality: bed, board, and hearth. The first common law is to provide a bed for anyone willing to pay a reasonable price. The next law is to offer guests food and drink, also known as board. The final element of innkeeper law is refuge or hearth. As travelers are vulnerable to theft and violence, it is the responsibility of the innkeeper to protect their guests.
Liminal Space
I don’t know why it happens exactly; all I know is that something strange occurs to guests as soon as they check into the hotel. For some reason, even if in real life they are perfectly well mannered, decent people with proper balanced relationships, as soon as they spin through the revolving doors the normal rules of behavior no longer seem to apply. (Edwards-Jones & Anonymous, 2004, p. 174)
Liminal spaces are commonly defined as transitional or transforming spaces, such as hotel or airport lobbies, building stairwells, elevators, empty parking lots, and so on. It is the physical space that a human occupies as he or she moves between one place in time and the next. It is often considered a temporary space. It can feel uncomfortable or it can feel freeing or relaxing, but it is a space viewed as a threshold before or between something else.
Scholars advocated that vacations are a limonoid period in which behavioral norms are temporarily abandoned due to the freedom from the constraints of domestic life (Lett, 1983; Levander & Guterl, 2015; Pritchard & Morgan, 2006; Schneider & Turner, 2017; Taheri, Farrington, Gori, Hogg, & O’Gorman, 2017; Thomas, 2005). During this transition period, guests suspend or invert their social ideologies, including temporarily breaking the rules of class and gender behavior, and experience a loss of their home culture. When newly arrived guests leave home behind, whether traveling for business or pleasure, their hotel stay is shaped by an encounter somewhere between the mundane and the extraordinary. Guests may experience anonymity, adventure, desire, discomfort, distraction, enticement, opportunity, personal transformation, refuge, risk, romance, and/or solace.
To enter a hotel is to cross over a threshold into a liminal place that is strange, yet familiar, and that offers freedom for some and constraint for others (Lett, 1983; Levander & Guterl, 2015; Pritchard & Morgan, 2006; Schneider & Turner, 2017; Taheri et al., 2017; Thomas, 2005). The hotel becomes a place where people’s stories unfold as guests come and go; where anything can happen during the stay. The body and mind can be restored, improved, and enhanced beyond what is or was. An ordinary person can be treated like royalty. A hotel room provides a unique setting where individuals can temporarily disregard status, responsibilities, and patterns of behavior woven into their routine of life at home. A hotel stay is often considered a temporary solution to, or retreat from, many of life’s varied problems.
Binaries
Several dichotomies are explored to understand the full spectrum of the lodging experience. The concept of paired opposites dates back to all early civilizations, including Heraclitus of Ancient Greece and the Lao Tzu from the Tao Ching (Brown, 2002). The Sanskrit word for circle, mandala, is based on multiple paired opposites. Jung’s personality theories are based on the theory of paired opposites; with the multiple paired opposites comprising the total personality (Jung, 1933, 1957). Binary opposition is commonly defined as a pair of two terms that cannot exist without reference to the other. For example, light is defined as the absence of darkness; goodness is the absence of evil. In the world of lodging, several such dichotomies exist and are explored in the next section.
Private Versus Public Spaces: Home Away From Home | Front and Back of House
Hotels are alluring places that uniquely capture the realities of our world where the lines between public and private spaces, labor and leisure, fortune and failure, desire and despair are regularly blurred (Guerrier & Adib, 2000; Levander & Guterl, 2015). Hotels are a domestic space, a home away from home, where guests are freed from many of the traditional constraints of being at home. The hotel space is shared by hosts (employees) and guests who each need their own public and private areas. Guests are not allowed into the back of the house, such as behind the registration desk, inside the kitchen, or within administrative offices. Similarly, hosts (employees) are expected to treat guests’ rooms as if they belong to guests throughout their stay and may only enter with permission. An exception is housekeeping staff who are allowed to enter, typically when the guest has left, to clean the room (Schneider & Turner, 2017).
Often times, the hospitality employee is treated as an invisible nonperson tasked with creating a positive experience (Guerrier & Adib, 2000; Schneider & Turner, 2017). If there is a spill in the lobby, no questions are asked, and hotel staff magically clean it up. If more towels are needed in a room, additional towels are delivered promptly on request. While guests might see housekeeping personnel in the hallway, most back-of-house employees are largely invisible to guests. Thus, the provision of the lodging experience is a binary: those who experience the lodging stay (guests) are conceptually and physical separated in the front of the house from those who provide it (staff) in the back of the house. This separation is maintained, even while both sets of people are present and perhaps temporarily engaged with one another.
Guest (Sovereign, Freedom) and Employee (Servant, Responsible)
To fully understand the lodging experience, the binary opposites of the hospitality host (or employee) and the hospitality guest should both be explored. Brown’s (2002) theory of acompañar is built on the conceptual framework of the paired opposites associated with helping professions; the helping professional and the person being helped. Bitner, Booms, and Mohr (1994) defined a service encounter as involving a minimum of two people that must be understood from these opposing perspectives. With this binary understanding, organizations are better able to design processes for both customers and employees to create quality service encounters.
Service management rhetoric is grounded in customer sovereignty with the service employee positioned to satisfy customer needs. Underlying this as a foundation, the “customer is always right” is a commonplace motto (Guerrier & Adib, 2000; Harris & Reynolds, 2003; Lett, 1983; Schneider & Turner, 2017; Yagil, 2008). The service role, due to its helping nature, places employees in a vulnerable position, as their primary task is to satisfy requests. The more guests pay, the more services they expect, whether those services are objectively right or wrong, whether they are frivolous or self-centered. For example, many hotel employees and managers spend time either identifying and evicting prostitutes or, in some circumstances, obtaining them for guests (Alexander, Maclaren, & O’Gorman, 2010; Edwards-Jones & Anonymous, 2004; Guerrier & Adib, 2000; Pritchard & Morgan, 2006; Sandoval-Strausz, 2007). If guests see their power as being higher than the power of the hotel staff, reinforced by the notion that the customer is always right, guest behavior can be observed as entitled.
Yet the presumption of consumer sovereignty is flawed, particularly when entitled customers’ behaviors are thoughtless, irrational, or abusive, and which often can disrupt the service experience from the perspective of the employee, the customer, and other customers (Guerrier & Adib, 2000; Harris & Reynolds, 2003). Additionally, there are some services that are not provided by hospitality organizations and, therefore, some customers’ expectations cannot or should not be satisfied. This sense of entitlement affects the way guests choose to react when they are dissatisfied with the level of an organization’s service. Some customers behaving in unusual ways as a result of that dissatisfaction (Yagil, 2008). Some guests become demanding and aggressive when they perceive that each service problem is a violation of their rights. Customers view the hospitality employee as the organization’s representative who, because of the customers’ entitlement, is the willing target of abuse when a service experience falls short of expectations. A cursory review of restaurant Yelp or vacation TripAdvisor reviews reinforces to the consumer that their viewpoint is not only right but can also be used to broadcast their views, right or wrong, to the general public. This is a newer form of (electronic) word of mouth influence that is openly shared to a wide global audience and acts to strengthen the consumer’s sense of power and entitlement.
Guerrier and Adib (2003) explored how employees seamlessly deliver pleasant interactions as they manage guests’ visions of their vacation experience. Because a hotel is a temporary home and leisure area for guests, and a workplace for employees, boundaries are blurred between work, recreation, and home. Hospitality employees are expected to be happy and energetic regardless of the hour, sympathetic ears to guests’ problems, and authoritative figures with misbehaving guests.
Deviance and misbehaving
I have been working in hotels long enough now not to judge people on appearances. But there’s one thing they all have in common. There’s one thing that absolutely everyone does when they come to a hotel: they steal. TV sets, teaspoons, ashtrays, bathrobes, drinks from the ludicrously named ‘honor bar’, KitKats, crisps, carpets, furniture, works of art. (Edwards-Jones & Anonymous, 2004, p. 4)
Classifications of dysfunctional, deviant, and difficult customers have been created by both theorists and practitioners. These behaviors can have consequences for customer-contact employees, other customers, and hospitality organizations. Zemke and Anderson (1990) identified that 30% of problems reported to companies are from customers’ own errors or product misuse. Zemke and Anderson (1990) created a typology of five “customers from hell,” including abusive egocentrics, insulting whiners, hysterical shouters, dictators, and freeloaders, who each use their deviant behaviors for gaining superior, faster, or free service. Withiam (1998) assigned multiple categories of “customers from hell” in the restaurant industry from screaming at servers, sending items back to the kitchen for no apparent reason, not leaving appropriate tips, and throwing tantrums if anything goes wrong. Using a critical-incident technique, Bitner et al. (1994) examined over 700 critical service encounters, from which four dysfunctional customer behaviors were identified from the employees’ perspectives: (a) drunkenness, (b) verbal and physical abuse, (c) breaking company policies, and (d) lack of cooperation. Bitner et al.’s (1994) research provides empirical evidence that difficult customer types do exist and they can be the source of their own dissatisfaction.
Fullerton and Punj (1993) drew on literature in the fields of sociology, psychology, and criminology to create a model suggesting that important drivers of dysfunctional customer behavior are the traits and predispositions of the consumer, including their personality, attitudes, moral development, aspiration fulfillment, desire for thrill seeking, and aberrant psychological dispositions, as well as age, gender, education, and economic status. The Fullerton and Punj (1993) model also stressed that a wide range of contextual factors affect the extent of dysfunctional customer behavior, specifically the physical environment, the types of products or services offered, the level of deterrence, and the organization’s public image. Reynolds and Harris (2009) identified variables that were significantly associated with the deliberate dysfunctional customer behavior from psychological obstructionisms variables (Machiavellianism, aggressiveness, sensation seeking, and consumer alienation), to servicescape variables (layout and design, atmospherics, exterior environment, and fellow customers) and situation-specific variables (dissatisfaction, inequity, and intoxication level).
Aslan and Kozak’s (2012) investigation of customer deviance directed against employees found that it included physical violence, physical sexual harassment, yelling, and behaving impolitely. They further observed that customers from different countries often have different deviant behaviors. Gursoy, Cai, and Anaya (2017) produced a typology featuring seven categories of disruptive behaviors of customers: hysterical shouters, inattentive parents with naughty children, oral abusers, outlandish requesters, poor hygiene manners, service rule breakers, and ignorant customers. Lugosi (2019) created a robust summary of deviant behavior categories in service management including the belligerent, cheats, deadbeats, family feuders, rule breakers, vandals, and thieves.
These numerous categories of behaviors discovered by multiple sets of researchers are not surprising given the nature of the hospitality industry (Bitner et al., 1994). Many hospitality experiences, including in restaurants, airlines, and hotels, involve serving food and beverages, including alcohol, where employees and customers are in tight public spaces for extended periods of time. Personal social interactions are carried out in front of other customers who are most often strangers. Additionally, customers often have transaction-based encounters during each service encounter with varying staff members rather than a long-term, relationship-based experience.
Hotels are a place of anonymity and ambiguity, and guests may behave in ways they do not normally behave at home. According to an Orbitz (2004) “Hotel Habits” Survey, 52% of adult Americans who have stayed in a hotel for leisure do things in a hotel that they would not normally do at home. About a fourth like using more towels than necessary and then throw them on the floor since they do not have to do the laundry. Sneaking items out of hotel rooms is a popular behavior, with almost 20% of respondents admitting to stealing toiletries off the housekeeping cart, or taking hotel towels (18%), bathmats (2%), or bathrobes (2%) with them when they finish their stay.
Employee response to deviant behavior
Employees strive to manage their anger when appeasing deviant guests, often relying on close relationships with colleagues for support, whether it is learning to detach, using humor behind the scenes, or working through their hurt in private (Guerrier & Adib, 2000; Harris & Reynolds, 2003; Yagil, 2008). As a result of customer misbehavior, service employees often display emotional distress, burnout, and withdrawal behaviors such as absenteeism. Reynolds and Harris (2006) studied restaurant employees with the objective of supplying insights in to the darker side of service. An analysis of their interviews with frontline employees and managers revealed 15 main forms of coping tactics. These are behaviors and routines that they used as they prepared for their shift, performed during work hours, and applied as they decompressed postshift.
Guerrier and Adib (2000) argued that characteristics of the hotel workplace shape how hotel employees and guests interact and contribute to the vulnerability of harassment by guests. Hotel bedrooms provide a space for guests to engage in sexual activity, with assumptions being made about employees providing sexual favors too. Guerrier and Adib (2000) expanded by stating that some restaurant chains teach their servers to flirt with customers as a means for increasing the amount spent, larger tips, and repeat business. The “job flirt” is part of the service offer in addition to the food and drink. The training also encourages alcohol consumption and excessive drinking and is one contributing factor in abusive incidents.
Sex and romance
Hotels occupy a fascinating place in the social imagination, often synonymous with romance, transgression, and sexual adventure (Alexander et al., 2010; Pritchard & Morgan, 2006; Thomas, 2005). Hotels are connected to popular culture and cinema with visions of wedding nights, honeymoons, prostitution, or clandestine meetings of lovers in an illicit sexual rendezvous. Pritchard and Morgan (2006) alluded that sex is a suggested aspect of the industry’s marketing strategies. Sensuality and sexual encounters frame tourist destinations and resort marketing, frequently hinting, often in exoticized and occasionally eroticized language, to an experience of risk, novelty, excitement, and fantasy. The marketing concept of “the dirty weekend” made popular in the United Kingdom has now spread to hotels around the globe, including hotel rooms designed around different sexual themes (Pritchard & Morgan, 2006).
In an early study, Lett (1983) investigated the Caribbean charter yacht tourism industry. The findings identified that tourists felt licensed to suspend everyday rules in their sensual, frivolous, and self-centered limonoid playground. Duman and Mattila (2005) demonstrated the role of selected affective factors (i.e., hedonics, control, and novelty) on the value of cruise vacation experiences. Specifically, hedonics was strongly linked to cruise vacationers’ behavioral intentions and value perceptions. Given that most human behavior is intrinsically pleasure seeking, hedonic behavior as an integral part of leisure experiences was a key finding in their research.
Results from Miao and Wei’s (2013) study of over 1,100 consumers revealed behavioral inconsistencies between their level of preenvironmental behavior when at home in comparison with staying in a hotel. Specifically, research participants disclosed a significantly higher level of proenvironmental behavior in their home versus staying in a hotel. Additionally, the study revealed that while normative motives are the dominant determinant of proenvironmental behavior in a household setting, hedonic motives are the strongest predictor of behavior in a hotel setting.
Regardless of holiday type or destination, when explaining what factors make a good vacation, all the women studied in Thomas’ (2005) research expressed the sense of freedom they experienced while on holiday. The notion that the components of a good holiday are “sun, sea, sand, and sex” was reinforced by the majority of women in this study. Numerous women in the study held demanding professional jobs, in positions of status and responsibility. Once detached from domestic life, the participants felt released from the expectations associated with specific roles they adhered to at home and work, and this sense of release was noteably combined with the anonymity provided by the holiday environment. The anonymity experienced on vacation contrasted markedly with the visibility permeating family and social networks at home.
Redmon (2003) researched people participating in playful deviance during Mardi Gras in New Orleans. The intense emotional experiences gave participants a transitory sense of personal freedom, power, and self-validation. To many festival attendees, such as those who participate in Mardi Gras, they entered a world of excess characterized by celebration, performance, and playfulness. They felt that they were able to remain anonymous to other festival participants and that news of any personal transgressions would not reach their family and friends back in their home communities.
Components of Lodging
Scholars have completed studies that segmented the lodging experience into identifiable components. Clow, Garretson, and Kurtz (1994) listed six aspects: security, service, reputation, appearance, location, and price. Callan (1995, 1998) identified 166 characteristics that were then grouped into 11 headings, which were essentially advancements of the work of Clow et al. (1994). Roberts and Shea (2017) and Roberts, Shea, and Johanson (2018) also considered the lodging experience and identified four behavioral dimensions of an overnight stay. These dimensions included individual safety and security, health and well-being, the comfort of daily routines, and the personal level of responsibility for the facilities. These components can be used to build a theory of lodging.
Safety and security. When asleep, every human is physically vulnerable. At home, the individual becomes familiar with the setting, learns the sounds and feel of the environment, and can make necessary adjustments to believe that the access points, such as doors and windows, are secured. What the subconscious detects when one is asleep becomes familiar and comfortable. When sleeping away from home, the individual wants the same feeling so that he or she can sleep without fear of intrusion or attack. In a lodging facility, the guest is new to the room. All aspects of familiarity are replaced by foreign sounds, smells, temperatures, and even air currents. Door and window locks probably operate different from those used at home, but the guest wants to assume that the security is adequate so that they can sleep in peace.
This sense of safety and security extends throughout the entire lodging property. Guests assume that once they enter the facility, that they are protected. They assume that the hotel has adequate safety protocols in place, such as human security guards, video cameras, secured entrances and exits, and so on. Whether in the lounge, café, or in the open lobby area, guests assume the mantel of hotel security envelopes them in a blanket of safety.
Health and well-being. Guests want hotel public spaces and a hotel room that is clean and free from harmful germs and disease. This aspect of the lodging experience has been previously studied (Cadotte & Turgeon, 1988; Dolnicar & Otter, 2003). The presumption is that the room, which includes the sleeping space and the bathroom, has been sanitized and is a healthy physical environment. The bed linen and bathroom towels have been replaced with clean, sanitized items. The bedspread is routinely laundered, the carpet thoroughly vacuumed, and the furniture has been dusted and wiped clean. The typical expectation is that the room is a private space that has not been contaminated; that the guest is living in an environment that is free of disease and that his or her well-being is protected by the housekeeping department; that no taint of a prior guest remains.
This expectation of well-being extends to all of the public spaces within the hotel. Guests presume that the spa or gym facilities are sanitized on a regular basis. They believe that the food service and beverage facilities and products meet local sanitation codes. They assume that lobby furniture is clean and safe to use. All of this is in spite of frequency of use. There may have been people using that piece of exercise equipment in the gym, or sitting on that lobby couch, just moments before the guest arrives in that space. But the guest still presumes cleanliness. The guest uses these hotel spaces with a sense that a level of care has been extended by the hotel that includes their own health and well-being.
Daily comforts of life. When at home, an individual can develop habits and preferences for dressing, bathing or showering, use of cosmetics, and the selection of linens and towels that meet personal preferences. Soaps, shampoos, toothpaste, and so on, are selected that best accommodate one’s individual personal features, tastes, and needs. Clothing is purchased and stored, laundered, and ready to wear. Daily routines are developed over time to aid one in getting ready for the day after having a healthy night’s sleep.
During the lodging stay, the traveler duplicates some of these items through what is packed in luggage. Transportation restrictions, such as security concerns at airports or issues of weight with luggage, impact what can be brought along. Hotels often provide some of the more common supplies such as soap, shampoo, and body lotions. They also supply towels, sheets, pillows, and so forth. While these amenities are needed by most travelers and fulfill their purposes, the brand, quality, and texture may not match that which is at home. The traveler makes allowances for these differences, sometimes contentedly, sometimes not, knowing that the compromise is temporary as it is only for the short length of the lodging stay.
There are other aspects of daily life that require adjustment. The machines and devices in the room are probably not the same as in the home. The room temperature controls are likely different and the guest must spend a bit of time working with them to achieve the desired warmth or coolness. Time is spent experimenting with the shower controls in order to produce a water temperature that is comfortable. The windows are typically covered with some sort of curtain or blind, which is likely different from what is at home. The room lighting may be too bright or too dim, causing the guest to make necessary adjustments. The remote control for the television usually requires study in order to operate the set correctly. Overall, it takes the guest a bit of time to learn how to manage these room features.
Similarly, the guest may use features of the hotel that require adapting to differences. The menu items may not mirror what is consumed at home. The hours of operation of guest services may be different than desired. For example, the restaurant may open at 6 A.M. but a guest may be used to eating breakfast at 5:30 A.M. The brand of oatmeal or the method of cooking it could result in a different texture or flavor. Such variances require the guest to adjust their individual routines of daily life.
Sense of responsibility. To a guest who is renting the space, there is a sense of entitlement. The hotel room becomes the person’s home for that night. Whether the guest is feeling detached from the space (“it’s just a room”) or views it with loving care (“it’s my home for now!”), the payment gives the guest the belief that they have the right to use the space in any reasonably private way that is desired. However, in contrast to how the home is provisioned, the guest is well aware of the transitory nature of an overnight stay. The guest will not have to live with the consequences of his or her actions in that room. If a piece of furniture is dinged by an awkward movement of a piece of luggage, the guest will not have to see the marred item after checkout. If a towel is used to clean shoes, the guest knows that housekeeping will take the towel away and replace it with a clean one. If the curtains are pulled slightly from the overhead rod when attempting to open or close them, the guest knows that hotel maintenance will conduct repairs later. If food is dropped onto the bedspread when eating while watching television, the guest knows that housekeeping will take care of the matter. The room can be as hot or as cool as desired and lights operated continuously with no consideration given to the utility costs.
In short, the guest feels a limited sense of responsibility for the room features and services. Certainly, if something significant were to happen, such as the television screen is smashed or the bed is set on fire, the guest is aware of personal liability. But absent of something major of this nature, the guest forgets about the room, and anything that may have happened therein, the moment he or she departs on the day of checkout. In contrast, the home is something that is provisioned for over a long period of time. Furniture is purchased with certain functions or styles in mind and is expected to be used for many years. If it is damaged, even in the slightest manner, the owner is responsible for any repairs. Utilities are generally paid separately from mortgage or lease payments so care is exercised in managing their monthly use. Laundered items, such as clothing, sheets, towels, and so on, are handled much more carefully as the owner intends to use them many times over the years.
This attitude often extends throughout the lodging facility. Guest use of the gym equipment, spa, the swimming pool, and so on, is often casual and careless as there is little to no consequence if a machine is abused, if towels are damaged, the pool water fouled, or if beverages are spilled. Patrons drinking in the bar begin to relax after consuming alcohol and the accompanying lowering of inhibitions could result in spills and glass breakage, loud and foul language or laughter, or even abusive behavior toward staff. In summary, guests of a lodging facility treat their physical environment differently than they treat the physical environment in their home. They have a reduced sense of responsibility and increased sense of entitlement while staying in a lodging facility.
The relationship of these four dimensions is useful to examine. Using Maslow’s (1943) Hierarchy of Needs as a basis for prioritizing these four dimensions into a hierarchical order (see Figure 1), the issue of safety and security would be primary. If one does not feel safe and secure when sleeping, all other concerns are set aside until safety is achieved. This primary concern is represented by the largest, outside circle in the model as it overarches everything about the guest room experience. Next would be personal health and well-being in the hotel room. While one’s basic physiological needs would presumably be met prior to traveling, one would not want to endanger that status through an unwitting health exposure in an unclean hotel room. This is represented by the second outside circle, again encompassing the next two dimensions. If health and well-being is knowingly threatened, it is likely the guest will address these concerns before anything else during the lodging experience. Third in priority would be the daily comforts of life. Being able to enact one’s desired routines of resting, cleaning up, and getting ready for the day helps to bring a sense of normalcy, especially when traveling and sleeping in a strange environment. This is represented by the large, middle circle in the model. While it does represent the majority of activities in the guest room, the prior two dimensions must be satisfied before the guest can comfortably engage in routine behaviors. Finally, the sense of responsibility for the guest room would be ranked last and is represented by the smaller circle inset toward the bottom of the model. While there is a fundamental sense of responsibility to reasonably care for any public space, the payment for the temporary use of the lodging facility gives the guest a sense of entitlement to a certain, but limited, degree. Knowing that there are little or no repercussions for minor marring of furniture or misuse of linens enables guest to engage in these misdemeanors.
Model of Lodging Guest Behavioral Dimensions
As viewed in the model, the dimensions are the same ones that travelers address in their own homes; however, the priority given to each is different when in a lodging facility. The short-term nature of the lodging stay in an unknown facility engenders a heightened sense of needing to sleep in a safe space and wanting to clean and dress in a hygienic environment. The act of purchasing the right to the lodging space also engenders a sense of entitlement. The lodger feels ownership of the space for the time it has been rented.
That feeling of limited ownership comes with a sense personal power to use the rented space as desired. Often, the first desire is to recreate the comforts of home. A desire for the familiar while traveling results in an attempt to replicate some of one’s daily life comforts while incorporating and adjusting to those provided in the hotel room. Accompanying this is the sense that responsibility is lessened in the temporary lodgings when compared with permanency of home. The guest knows that any minor misuse of room or facility features will be forgotten after checkout since it is all provided by the vendor for a nightly fee. The guest walks out the door with hardly a thought about what occurred during the stay. Likewise, the hotel staff quickly forget the departing occupant as they prepare for the next.
This model depicting how guests behave in a lodging guest room is intended to capture observations of how a human being perceives and interacts with the rented sleeping space and larger lodging facility when away from home. The behaviors are distinctive when viewed in this different environment. Those observations in the model are crystalized into a theory that concretely captures the guest behavioral experience.
Theory of Lodging
The theory of lodging is centered on the concept of refuge and refresh. The guest seeks a lodging facility for the night so that he or she can take safe shelter while sleeping and then have a bathroom in which to refresh oneself for the coming new day. Beyond sleep, the refreshment of self often includes steps to wash (a bath or shower) and the donning of clean clothes.
It is the behavior of the guest within that safe and hygienic space that is used to further develop the theory. The guest sense of entitlement and the diminished sense of responsibility seem to explain some of the more careless behaviors that ensue (as described above). These concepts of refuge and refresh along with entitlement are added to the model to create the theory of lodging (see Figure 2). The theory can be explained as follows. A need for nightly refuge and refreshment leads to the purchasing of lodging. With that purchase, the lodger receives rights and responsibilities. Within those are the right to a safe and secure place to sleep, along with a hygienic space to rest, eat, and clean oneself. The responsibilities include not destroying or removing the property of the lodging facility during the rented time of use. Imbued within those rights are a sense of entitlement to recreate the daily comforts of life and to do so with little regard to the maintenance of the facility. After all, one has paid for the room. It is unlikely that anyone knows the guest or would likely remember them later. What happens in that private, rented space is the choice of the lodger. The rest is the responsibility of the lodging facility.
Theory of Lodging
The theory can be useful to lodging operators as it could aid in the design of the lodging products and services that are offered. Understanding how the lodging guest perceives the role of the room and its use could enable designers to accommodate these differences. As examples, furniture could be selected and placed to facilitate the unfamiliar movement of awkward luggage shapes. Window coverings could be selected for their ease of operation by unfamiliar users rather than for their stylish appearance. Gift shops could carry more daily use comfort-of-life products in a wider array of choices, such as different brands of toothpaste, shampoo, and so forth. Housekeepers could better understand guest activity and anticipate how to provide clean products and services to meet those desires.
The theory can also be of use to scholars. Consumer behavior research could be expanded to incorporate this guest room behavior. Operations management theory could be impacted to accommodate the shift in guest perspectives when using the hotel room and property facilities such as the spa, pool, gym, restaurant, and so on. This line of reasoning demonstrates that the view “a room is a room is a room” does not hold under all conditions. For the typical hotel guest, the value, role, and use of the paid overnight stay is distinctive from personal accommodations provided at home.
Future Research
Taheri et al. (2017) posited that when consumers become more involved in a hotel’s limonoid spaces, a more desired experience is created, and a higher level of satisfaction is achieved. Pritchard and Morgan (2006) argued that hospitality and tourism scholars should advance their theory building from the idea that the hotel is merely a built physical environment with a focus on operations management. Instead, researchers should explore aspects of these liminal spaces of transition and transgression, and explore the spaces used by different people from different cultures for different activities at different times to gain a fuller understanding of hospitality. Research should also delve into the issues of identity, power, and sexuality in hospitality spaces.
As hospitality research continues to evolve, Bell (2009) suggested that more questions than answers will emerge. What compels the act of hospitality? Where does the act of hospitality take place, and when? Are the copresence of host and guest required? Do both the host and guest have to be human? Is the transaction always voluntary on both sides? Where does power lie in the relationship? As the definition of hospitality continues to expand, is hospitality considered a service, a process, an experience, or all three? Through hospitality’s constant evolution, industry innovators enact ways that routine hospitality services can be turned into memorable events within the hotel product and services (Gilmore & Pine, 2002). Williams (2006) noted that tourism and hospitality organizations must look beyond traditional approaches by creating escapist activities that involve active guest participation and immersion, including allowing participants to create new identities and realities for themselves.
Thaler and Ganser (2015) suggested that to understand human behavior means to observe what actually happens in the world around us, including how real people behave in response to the situations, incentives, and policies they encounter, without being blinded by theory-driven expectations and predictions. This process necessitates collecting relevant data and being alert to unseen data, especially when they do not conform to expected theories. If hospitality researchers were to relax the standard economic assumption that everyone in the economy is rational and selfish, and instead entertained the possibility that some of the players in the economy are sometimes human, which includes some irrationality and whimsy, they may find valuable new insights into new theories of more dimensions of hospitality.
