Service Encounters and Guests Patronage of Hotels

In service oriented businesses, interactions between service providers and customers are inevitable. These interactions create impressions in the minds of the parties which to some extent define patronage outcome. For a meaningful outcome, an understanding of the creators of satisfactory patronage is germane. This study investigates the influence of customers’ encounters in defining the outcome of hotel patronage. This study adopted a cross-sectional design using a structured questionnaire survey of guests of 3 star and above rated hotels in Yenagoa, Bayelsa state Nigeria .Four hundred copies of questionnaire were distributed in ten strategically selected hotels, and 290 copies were found useful. This represents about 73% response rate . The SPSS 23.0 statistical software package were used for data analysis. Multiple regression analysis and Pearson correlation was employed to test the formulated hypotheses at 5% significance level. This study reports that youth are in majority of hotel patrons. Empirical analysis further reveals that all the dimensions of service encounters reports a significant relationship with word- of- mouth recommendations. Furthermore, the regression analysis reveals that peace of mind, moment of truth, outcome focus and product experience could explain about 53% variation in patronage outcome. The paper conclude that all the dimensions of customer experience has a significant influence on word- of- mouth recommendations of guests. This paper recommend among others things the training and retraining of service personnel. This training should equip frontline employees with the requisite skills that would enable them create and manage pleasurable experiences.