Investigating the wellness tourism factors in hot spring hotel customer service

Purpose – This study aims to establish customer service factors for wellness tourism from both service providers and customer perspectives, and to determine whether gender and age factors affect older tourist opinions of customer service. Design/methodology/approach – The authors interviewed 13 experts in the hot spring hotel industry and more than 469 hot spring hotel visitors who are over 50 years of age. Content validity and homogeneity reliability as proposed by Aiken were used to confirm customer service factors. This study uses the verbal-linguistic evaluation to assess customer service factors and each service item associated with these factors. Findings – Eight crucial customer service factors, from high to low, are personnel services, environments, healthy diet, relaxation, health promotion treatments, experience of unique tourism resources, social activities, and mental learning. Research limitations/implications – This study implicated allocation and management of input resources as the service factors that are used for determining the preferences of older consumers in wellness tourism. Originality/value – Numerous countries are currently facing an aging population and market opportunities for wellness tourism are popular with the tourism industry. Studies show that enhanced customer service increases competitive advantage in the tourism industry. However, customer service differs from what customers prefer. For this study, the authors compiled the viewpoints of older consumers, hotel personnel, and expert opinions in the hotel industry to identify customer-service factors in wellness tourism. The analytical results of this study suggest that hot spring hotels in Taiwan can focus on critical customer-service items, resource management, and resource allocation.