Experiencing hospitality: an exploratory study on the experiential dimensions of hospitality

What is hospitality? Only few academic articles tap into the meaning of the concept of hospitality. Especially academic investigation of hospitality from a guest perspective is scarce; the combination of ‘hospitality’ and ‘experience’ has received hardly any attention. The present paper describes a first step in the understanding of what people in service environments experience as hospitable. Two exploratory qualitative studies, with service experts and consumers, were carried out in order to identify characteristics of the experience of hospitality. The studies revealed that experiencing hospitality is primarily a perception of personal attention. Furthermore, the research resulted in nine so-called experiential dimensions of hospitality: welcome, safety, empathy, servitude, acknowledgement, autonomy, surprise, entertainment and efficiency.