Importance bias in business hotel quality surveys: the role of travelers’ heterogeneity

Thanks to a wide survey, recording business travelers’ perceived overall hotel quality, importance and performance of room and bathroom, external services and personnel, this work aims at investigating whether socio-demographic, trip and business-related variables influence an eventual tendency of respondents to over/understate the importance of hotels’ attributes. Moreover, we test the dependence of the interviewees’ evaluations of the importance of each of the three mentioned aspects on both the overall satisfaction and the perceived performance with the corresponding aspect, highlighted by the extant literature. In addition, we empirically verify if the importance statements for each aspect are affected by both the importance and the performance of the other hotel’s attributes. Results indicate that the differences in importance statements between individuals with certain characteristics, taking business trips with determinate features, can be ascribed to differences in their tendency to state higher or lower importance values, than they actually conceive, that is explained by these characteristics and features. Furthermore, findings concerning room and bathroom and external services point out that the response bias is negatively correlated with the overall satisfaction and directly related to the performance of both the personnel and the attribute itself. This evidence disconfirms the thesis that the poor performance of an attribute makes it more important in the perception of the customer. For all the aspects, the bias is positively influenced by the importance of the other attributes