ABSTRACT

The study of delight is an emerging research area in marketing and tourism that is both practically and theoretically important (Crotts et al. 2008). In the 1980s, academics and practitioners began to find that customers wanted more than to be satisfied (Cadotte et al. 1987; Churchill and Surprenant 1982; Deming 1986; Rollins and Bradley 1986). In the 1990s, services research found that higher levels of satisfaction and/or service quality may produce exceptional behavioural results, such as greater loyalty (Parasuraman et al. 1993; Schlossberg 1990). Customer delight was thought to be the key to the more elusive goals of loyalty and loyalty-driven profit. Since these beginnings, research into delight has grown substantially in the consumer behaviour, marketing and tourism literatures.