Feelings and Scenes of Rural Homestay Inns in China: A Perspective of Service Encounter

Abstract

As a new form of business, rural homestay inn is booming in China, boosting the transformation and upgrading of leisure tourism and promoting the sustainable development of rural tourism. This study firstly emphasizes the humanistic care in the service process through the content analysis of 30 short videos and the findings that such hotels highlight the word “warmth” in their marketing. Based on this, this study clarifies that in the Chinese context, encounter is essential for gaining warmth. Therefore, the study constructs a model with service encounter as the core concept and explores customer loyalty in rural homestay inns. A total of 450 questionnaires were distributed, of which, 407 were valid. In addition, descriptive statistical analysis, reliability test, correlation analysis, and multiple linear regression analyses were conducted on the collected questionnaires. Results show the following: (1) service encounter includes physical environment encounter, service personnel encounter, and other customer encounter; (2) experience value includes functional emotional and social cognitive values; (3) physical environment encounter and service personnel encounter significantly affect the experience value; (4) physical environment encounter and service personnel encounter significantly affect customer loyalty; and (5) functional emotional and social cognitive values positively affect customer loyalty, and social cognitive value affects more significantly. On this basis, this study introduces the following suggestions: (1) highlighting the characteristics of rural homestay inns and creating a unique cultural atmosphere, (2) paying attention to human care and deepening emotional communication, and (3) improving the customer experience to satisfy higher consumer demand.