Key Drivers Of Customer Delight In Resort Hotel: A Cross-Cultrual Perspective

China’s resort hotel will be in a golden period of development for next decade. With the rapid development in holiday tourism market, increasingly sophisticated customers will have higher requirements and expectations for the resort hotels. The core concept of resort hotel is to create a happy and pleasant environment. Therefore, by understanding the customer’s emotions, especially positive emotions, resort hotel can not only satisfy customers, but also provide customer delightful experience.Delight as a positive emotion are getting more and more attention from the academic and industry attention in recent years. As resort hotels receive guests from different nationalities and cultures, it is a complex attempt for hotel to provide delight experience to every customer. Are customers from different cultures possible to be delighted by different things? The study chose several customer delight drivers according to literature review and customer interviews. The guests in the survey came mainly from China and English-speaking countries (the United States, British and Canada). Using a process of hierarchical analysis, the study analyzed the drivers of customer delight and concluded that while some common service elements exists, for example, both guests from China and English-speaking countries are delight by personalized service in guest room. However, customers from different cultures can also be delighted by different services and amenities, for example, Chinese guests are more delighted by food, while guests form English-speaking countries are more pleased with add-on service. The study finally developed a resort hotel customer delight model and gave suggestion for resort hotels to achieve customer delight.