Front stage with no front-stage employees: customer perceptions of self-service hotels

Ritva Höykinpuro

Chapter 8 in Leadership in Spaces and Places, 2015, pp 163-180 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter looks at customers’ perceptions of space in a case when the space is the service. Self-service hotels provide an illustration of this phenomenon. A classical theatre metaphor is used to describe a self-service hotel as a service performance where customers are replacing the actors on a stage. A few customers shared their experiences on overnighting in a self-service hotel. Six themes emerged from these customers’ narratives: the need for front stage employees in service encounters, virtual back stage employees, perceptions of hospitality, sensuous experiences, the meaning of co-customers, and a target group of a self-service hotel. This study contributes to designing services in a case when the space is the service. The study is explorative in nature. Hence, it gives a number of ideas for future research.

Keywords: Business and Management; Economics and Finance; Social Policy and Sociology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/9781783477913.00018.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:15940_8

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().