Customizing customer journey in hotels: A focus on human touch

There are criticisms that the hospitality industry has lost its human touch as a competitive edge. While previous studies have examined how high-touch customer experiences should be provided, their recommendations are often related to humanizing service employees and technologies. It remains unclear how human touch should be better leveraged and incorporated into service design to enhance customer experience throughout the customer journey. This study explores how hotel service encounters could be tailored to customers with varying needs for human interactions. Using multigroup and importance-performance map analyses, customer experiences reflecting different levels of human touch were compared across critical service encounters throughout the guest cycle. The findings identify the service encounters where human touch is particularly important, recognize the characteristics of customers who desire a higher level of human touch, and provide explanations of the underlying reasons. Follow-up interviews were conducted to complement the quantitative results. These analyses collectively provide a comprehensive explanation of how high-touch service should be provided in hotels.