ABSTRACT

Whether or not a hospitality organization considers the nature of its customers’ experience, customers leave with an impression of that experience – good, bad, or indifferent. The customers’ experience is important and inescapable – surveys show that customers base their decision to revisit or recommend on their impressions and “assessment” of that experience. Fortunately (or not, for some organizations) the customer experience can be highly malleable and managed by hospitality organizations. The purpose of this chapter is to identify how hospitality organizations can systematically manage their customers’ experiences so that they will be both perceived and remembered in more favorable ways. We take examples from Las Vegas – a city renowned for its use of experiential marketing – to demonstrate our findings. We discuss how the new “science of the mind” may have implications for framing and researching the nature of the customer experience and suggest several techniques for hospitality researchers to consider.