Exploring the Impact of Innovativeness of Hospitality Service Operation on Customer Satisfaction

Service Innovation is critical for service improvement and development that enhance customer satisfaction. Besides the importance of technology and tangible products, innovativeness leverages customer satisfaction by stimulating their five senses perception. Service-Dominant Logic emphasises the role of innovativeness in service delivery in alignment with customer perception to create Service Innovation. In other words, innovativeness involves the innovative service clues that drive customer perception when experiencing the intangible values of the operation. Despite the importance of innovativeness, studies for the issue appear to be limited and are especially scarce on qualitative research technique. Thus, this study aims to explore the impact of innovativeness on customer satisfaction in the case of hotel operations as qualitative research. A set of propositions are generated based on relevant works of literature and an approximate of one thousand reviews on the TripAdvisor website. The reviewers were international customers of 20 boutique hotels in Vietnam. The thematic analysis with deductive approach was employed to determine the key themes of Innovativeness that influence customer satisfaction. The findings suggest a conceptual model about the influences of 1) Innovative Humanic Clues, 2) Innovative Mechanic Clues and 3) Innovative Functional Clues on the customer's Transaction-Specific Satisfaction. The model explains how customers perceive innovativeness through the five senses and their evaluation on the innovativeness of the operations. The study, therefore, addresses the importance of innovativeness in service operation management to satisfy customer expectation for a new experience.