Abstract To address the gap of academic study of customer delight which lacks of service employees' perspectives, we conducted a survey research to study service employees' perception and performance of delightful services. We also studied the differences in concept understanding and performance evaluation between the managerial and staff levels. Four categories of delightful service were identified: customizing attentive behaviors, professional skills, open communication style, and sincere and gracious behaviors. This study showed that hotel managers and service employees had a similar level of understanding of the importance of delightful service. In terms of performance, both managers and staff regarded service employees' performance of delightful services as average and must be improved. For two service categories (customizing attentive behaviors and open communication style), the evaluations of managers were more favorable compared with employees' assessments. By study the differences in concept understanding of customer delight and assessment of performance of delightful services between the managerial and staff levels, this study provides practical suggestions to assist hotel managers to improve their implementation of delightful services. Peer knowledge and experience sharing method and the coach training method are suggested to be more effective in training service employees with adequate skills and attitudes to perform delightful services. More incentive programs and customer feedback programs should be implemented to encourage service employees to perform delightful services.