An exploration of factors affecting hotel consumers' health from an ecological systems theory perspective: A meta-analytical study

Abstract

Consumers are placing increasing importance on their health experiences during their hotel stays. Previous studies have explored the various factors influencing consumer health experiences from multiple independent micro-perspectives, such as hotel environment and service type. In addition to the lack of generalization of influencing factors and outcomes from an overall perspective, existing research also ignores the impact of some important macro variables, such as culture and time. To fill these gaps, this study adopted a meta-analytic approach, guided by the Ecological Systems Theory, and explored based on 44 independent studies obtained from 41 empirical papers with 19,625 participants. The findings of the study indicate that individual factors (e.g. consumer personal assessment, motivation, and personality), microsystem factors (e.g. hotel environment and hotel service), macrosystem factors (e.g. culture), and chronosystem factors (e.g. critical events) all have an impact on hotel consumer health. In addition, this study builds on the findings of existing research to summarise the gaps and shortcomings of this research topic. These findings can help hotels enhance consumer health experiences and promote related research.