A Holistic Approach to Design of Hospitality Services : Focused on Application for Hotel Service

Design is a knowledge-based economic activity to create values for the market and end-consumers, a management activity to enhance efficiency for suppliers and customers, a pre-requisite to and causality relationship with R&D,production, marketing, and services. Service design, from the conceptual stage, is closely interwind and interacts with marketing, communication, R&D, production, and other business activities within the value chain of a designated service. Customers prefer to consider all these business activities as one integrated value proposition covering both material components (products) and immaterial components (services). Successful design is similar to an organic body that dynamically responds to environment, customers or end users. As the customers’ emotion & sensibility, intelligence, life-styles, and the society in general are continuously evolving and complicated, multidisciplinary and consilient approaches to service design are necessary to understand the customers'economic, social, aesthetic expectations. This paper proposes a design system (or a process) for hospitality services by deploying a holistic approach to the structuring of relationships in which all service factors play part. This study introduces a new view on the changed role of service providers and customers in designing highly customized services by focusing on the customers’ experiences/expectation as the driving force of design. The Customer Journey Mapping of Experience with touch-points is the key concept in designing hospitality services in this paper.