Satisfying and delighting senior guests at hotels

To delight customers, hotels must exceed guests’ expectations by meeting not only their implicit and explicit needs, but also their attractive needs. In other words, hotels need to surprise their guests if they want to offer memorable service experiences. The provision of unexpected benefits together with core services can lead to extreme satisfaction and delight. While many studies have addressed tourists’ satisfaction, little research has been conducted with specific regard to customer delight among senior tourists at hotels. This study contributes to fill this gap in literature by analyzing hotel service quality from the perspective of senior tourists. Specifically, we intend to explore what hotel attributes delight senior guests and to identify the needs being met by these attributes. A qualitative research was conducted among Italian senior tourists with the longinterview technique. The findings suggest that senior guests are delighted when hotel attributes meet their needs for uniqueness, novelty seeking, knowledge seeking and emotional atmosphere. The results contribute to extend the literature about hotel service quality for the senior market. Moreover, relevant professional implications for hotel managers are suggested. In the future, quantitative studies could be conducted to assess the validity of the results.