Hospitality Service Encounters: focusing on the management of the impressions of front line employees and guest satisfaction

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between the use of tools to manage impressions by front line hotel employees, and guest satisfaction. In order to gain a better understanding of this relationship that occurs in the service encounter between staff and guests, the perspectives of role theory, scripts theory, and the dramaturgical approach were adopted (BITNER; BOOMS and TETREAULT, 1990; SOLOMON et al., 1985). A descriptive exploratory methodology was adopted, with two phases. Qualitative and quantitative. In the first phase, interviews were conducted applying an interpretative analysis of the interviewees‘ discourse. In the second, the fieldwork consisted of data collection with a sample of 207 guests staying at 4 and 5 star hotels, by means of a structured questionnaire. The results obtained from the discourse analyses, and those from the multivariate statistics indicate that certain impression management tactics and strategies used by the front line employees do influence guest satisfaction in relation to the services. Key words: Impression Management, tourism services, satisfaction.