An Empirical Study on the Relationship between Service Encounter, Customer Experience and Repeat Patronage Intention in Hotel Industry

This research, based on literature review and questionnaire survey, applied the method of structural equation model (SEM) to empirically analyze how service encounter affects customer´s future repeat patronage intention through customer experience. The result showed that hotel service encounter could be summarized as three fundamental elements, i.e., physical environment, service personnel and self-service technique, and hotel customer experience could be divided into 3 dimensions, i.e., physiological experience, affective experience and correlative experience; moreover, some recursive influencing relations exist between such three groups of concepts as service encounter, customer experience and future patronage intention; customer´ physiological experience, affective experience and correlative experience could significantly and directly affect his repeat purchase intention, whilst the three elements of service encounter haven´t any direct impact on the engendering of repeat patronage intention, but indirect.