ABSTRACT
The hospitality industry is under pressure to innovate in order to remain competitive. This innovation is steered by several trends including increasing global mobility and the need to cater for diverse guest groups and their cultures. Some theorists view culture as a hierarchy with the national level functioning as an umbrella over many subcultures or co-cultures. Cultural values clearly play an important role in the way consumers make purchasing decisions and nationality may be significant. Pantouvakis suggests that cross-cultural research is in its infancy in the fields of tourism and hospitality. To illustrate the extent to which nationality seems to affect the preferences of guests in a hospitality and tourism context, this chapter presents a case study that analyses the spa preferences of guests of different nationalities in Estonia. It focuses on religion and age as two areas which have been neglected in some past studies or were simply seen as subordinate to nationality.
