You will prepare and submit a term paper on Why Hospitality is about Providing an ‘Experience’ rather than a ‘Service’. Your paper should be a minimum of 2500 words in length. In the hospitality industry, no day is like the other and time is too precious since it is all about creating the best memorable events for the guest. Dealers in the hospitality sell the experience and not a service. Experiences are memorable moments, which are paramount for the guest since the main business in the hospitality industry is the repeat business. Repeat business comes from the same guests who had an exquisite, lifetime experience in a particular hotel and due to that “experience”, they return to the hotel a second time (Barrows and Powers, 2008, p. 28).
The hospitality industry thrives on a great level of passion and enthusiasm, a drive for perfection and loyalty to succeed unlike in the service industry. Service is just but part of the experience offered by the hospitality industry. The hospitality industry is all about building a personalized connection with the clients by offering a distinctive exotic experience rather than providing service, which makes all the difference. Each guest has different expectations and therefore each guest is handled individually. Understanding each guest’s unique needs and expectations is vital to surpass his or her expectations (Ford and Heaton, 2000, p. 42).
The guests are also a tool of marketing in the hospitality industry since once a guest has had an exemplary experience. they will most likely talk about it to other people. This acts as a marketing tool and the hotel will continue having repeat and new guests due to word-of-mouth marketing. A customer’s satisfaction is affected by a number of factors such as the customer’s emotional state, psychographics, and social environment, which is essentially a comparison of expectations with experience rather than a measure of absolute service performance. The customer’s judgment is about the extent to which expectations have been met, and what experiences they had. Examples that illustrate how hospitality includes the creation of experiences are very many, including the experiences that the guest has when they first arrive at a hospitality establishment.
