Making Sense of Fengshui and Customers’ Experiences of Hotel Room Stays: A Vignette-Induced Interview Approach

ABSTRACT Despite the well-documented cultural importance of fengshui, little research has been carried out to provide a theoretically complex view of its impacts on customers’ experiences of hotel stays. This study explores customers’ perceptions of hotel rooms’ fengshui and seeks to make sense of links between the environment, fengshui beliefs and hotel-staying experiences. Under a qualitative paradigm, a vignette-induced interview approach was employed to deconstruct beliefs in fengshui and their influence on customers’ perceptions of hotel rooms. The findings reveal that customers’ beliefs in fengshui explicitly or implicitly affect their perceptions of environmental stimuli, evaluations of hotel rooms, and behavioral intentions. Moreover, hotel guests focus more on prevention than promotion when staying in hotel rooms, especially those with strong beliefs in fengshui. Based on the findings, a conceptual framework is developed by integrating the perceptional process model and the regulatory focus theory, which may usefully inform future quantitative research.