The Impact Of Unearned Preferential Treatment On Customer Tolerance In Hotel Industry

In recent years,with the development of sharing platforms such as Booking and the short-term rental homestay industry such as Aribnb,the traditional hotel market is over-saturated.Hotel managers have realized that developing a new customer is more costly than retaining an old customer.Therefore,they have shifted the focus of development from attracting customers to retaining customers,creating a better service experience for customers in the price range,and improving service quality to gain a competitive advantage.The gap between customers’ perceived service level and their expected service level has been used to measure their evaluation of service quality.The hotel service is a continuous process,and some flaws will inevitably appear in the entire service provision process.Therefore,the current service performance will not only affect the overall evaluation of customers,but also enable customers to adjust their expectations during the service process and modify the width of the tolerance interval.This tolerance interval will be used as a follow-up and overall service quality evaluation standard.For this study,we specifically aim to explore the effect and internal mechanism of unearned preferential treatment provided in the initial phrase of service delivery such as a free upgrade or welcome gift on customers’ evaluation for the subsequent and even overall service quality.That is,unexpected rewards trigger customer emotions,in the form of delight and social discomfort,which results in changes of ZOT threshold.The findings generated from three studies reveal that unearned preferential treatment inversely influences adequate expectation,the lower end of ZOT,whereas desire expectation,the higher end of ZOT,remains unchanged.ZOT,thus,increases as a result.These findings,however,vary as a function of types(upgrade vs.gift)and values(high vs.low)of preferential treatment.The usage of different reward types and values sometimes creates a “too-much-of-a-good-thing” effect,suggesting that if hotel has decided to provide free upgrades to customers,the width of ZOT will not increase as in the case of offering welcome gifts.Moreover,the unearned preferential treatment only exterts effect on ZOT via revised adequate expectation when the treatment value is relatively low(in contast to high value).Third,emotional mediators like customer delight and social discomfort contribute to increases in the width of ZOT.Fourth,this research reviews that membership matters.Compared with membership customers,non-program customers express higher delight and lower social discomfort,which will result in a wider ZOT.Practical implications are also reported.This research has strong practical and theoretical value,verifying that preferential treatment for free will potentially "prevent" the negative impact of subsequent service defects by expanding the customer’s tolerance for service defects.This study links the preferential treatment for no-work with many dependent variables,such as customer satisfaction,repurchase willingness,and the customer’s tolerance range,clarifies the relationship between the preferential treatment for no-work and the customer ’ s tolerance zone,and expands the use of satisfaction as a Historical research on the main outcome variables.