The Effects of Hotel Environmental Factors on Consumers’ Emotions and AttitudesThe Moderating Effect of Lifestyle

As time changes, this marks the beginning of a new era where consumers are pursuing a higher quality of life. Nowadays most conventional hotels provide customers with elegant and comfortable accommodations, but these types of traditional accommodating settings no longer have the appealing effect to captivate mass audience’s interests nor to satisfy their demands. And so this is where the new and refreshing types of hotels come in for breaking the old traditional designed methods used in hotels. Comparing to traditional and conservative hotels, the new innovative hotels use daring visual color variants along with the background music to help stimulate consumer senses and shape their attitudes towards the hotel. Hence, the purposes of this research are hereby threefold: first, to explore whether the hotel environmental factors such as color and music would affect consumers’ emotions and perceived quality; second, to explore whether the lifestyle of consumers would moderate the effects of color and music on consumers’ emotions and perceived quality. The study will apply experimental method with a 2 x 2 factorial design. The independent variables will be color (analogous scheme vs. contrasting scheme) and music (classical vs. Jazz). There will be two mediating variables, one is emotion and the other is perceived quality. Lifestyle will be used as a moderating variable to explore whether it influences the effect of color and music on emotions and attitudes. The dependent variable in this study will be purchasing intention. Subjects must have travel experiences staying at a hotel within the past 6 months to be qualified to participate in the experiment. Qualified subjects will be randomly assigned to one the experimental designs. After viewing photos of different hotel design with different background music played at the same time, subjects will be asked to complete a questionnaire to elicit their current emotions and their attitudes towards to the assigned hotel. Information of subjects’ life style and demographic background will be also collected via the questionnaire. Theoretical and managerial implications will be discussed.