Tourist Experience on Memorable Hospitality Services

Social media, online review and photo posting have created an impact on hotel guest experience. This study explores how tourists capture their experience on memorable hospitality services via each stage of the long-term memory system (i.e. encoding, consolidation and retrieval). User-generated content was analyzed from three five-star hotels in Guangdong Province, China, and linked with each stage of the memory system to highlight the concepts of mindfulness, working memory, self-identity, remembering and storytelling on the memories of guests. Among the three stages of the long-term memory system, stage 1-encoding received the highest weight, followed by stage 3-retrieval and stage 2-consolidation. This result corroborates that practitioners can focus on the opportunities of the memory consolidation (stage 2) and retrieval (stage 3) of tourists. From a theoretical perspective, this study contributes by demonstrating how a long-term memory framework derived from psychology research could be used to provide a broad investigation of the memories of guests in hospitality research. Moreover, this study exhibited how the combination of text-based guest reviews and shared photographs of positive and negative memories can be used in memory-related hospitality studies. Hence, this study elucidated how a long-term memory framework could be a relevant reference for hospitality practitioners and researchers.