A preconceived notion due to past experience could influence the user perception of building facilities during the evaluation of the service gap and influence facility managers’ decisions. This paper has evaluated the effect of past experience on the perception of hostel facilities is the first of its kind. This paper tries to investigate the influence of past experience on user perception on facilities such as Visual, Thermal, Aural, Fire safety, Hygiene, and Communication. Over 234 respondents participated in the perception survey. The study computed the service gap using the SERVQUAL model, and the influence of past experience was investigated in expectation, satisfaction and service gap using the Mann–Whitney U test. The users without experience and females have shown higher expectation ratings and lower satisfaction ratings, increasing the performance gap. The past experience did not influence both the service gap and satisfaction. Past experience has shown a medium effect on Thermal and Visual aspects and a small effect on Communication. Therefore, checking the influence of past experience is not recommended during building performance evaluation. Even though, while evaluating the Thermal performance alone, the influence of past experience may be evaluated due to its dynamic nature and high energy consumption rate. Cubic regression models were used to explain the proportion of users against change in performance gap under the aspects. That can be used to benchmark similar projects.