The role of culture and purchase motivation in service encounter evaluations

This study was developed to shed some light on the role of culture and purchase motivation in influencing consumers’ evaluations of services. More specifically, the goal was to contrast Asian and Western travelers’ perceptions of brief, routine-type service encounters in a hotel context. The results of this empirical study suggest that culture-based biases in the evaluation process might depend on the consumers’ purchase-related goals. Furthermore, our findings indicate that the use of expressed emotions as an indicator of how the customer feels about the service might be restricted to Western customers. Managerial implications of this study relate to the training of customer-contact employees.