Physical attractiveness of service employees and customer engagement in tourism industry

摘要

As the importance of customer engagement gains more and more recognition, it is critical to study customer engagement strategy in the intensely competitive tourism industry. Answering the call for research on antecedents of tourists' customer engagement in the tourism industry, we consider the role of employees' physical attractiveness. We adopt a mixed-methods approach; using interviews and three scenario-based experiments, we explore, hypothesize, and test the relationship between employees' physical attractiveness and customer engagement of tourists. The results show that (1) physical attractiveness of employees affects tourists' customer engagement, that (2) the main effect of physical attractiveness is mediated by the desire for social interaction, and that (3) the main effect is moderated by tourism service characteristics (i.e., tourism service expertise).