The Empirical Research on Transfer of Cultural Meaning from Commodity to Customer—A Case Study for Hotel Staying Experience

Abstract

This purpose of this article is to explore the case for the integration of art, aesthetics, and the atmosphere of local life into hotel interior designs. We used statistical empirical methods to verify whether the transformation of cultural elements into tourism products can really bring tourists to feel cultural meaning. In this study, we use the “Movement of meaning” model proposed by McCracken as a validation of how consumers feel the effects of cultural learning through the consumption of hotel stays. This research focuses on the integration of local culture and hotel consumption in the part of cultural learning, and particularly on the second stage of the meaning trajectory: hotel tourists feel the cultural meaning transfer when they consume and stay. In order to objectively investigate the influence of cultural products on guest consumption experience, we asked more than 187 hotel guests for their data to understand their perceptions of artistic experience and cultural meaning through questionnaires. The contribution of our research is to provide a framework for testing the validity of cultural meanings transformed into commodity consumption for tourism. The value of this research lies in our empirical research on how people perceive the beauty of local culture, and how the combination of cultural elements and hotel design allows customers to experience the cultural meaning benefits. The quantitative verification method of this research for the “meaning movement” model can be used as an operational procedure for tourism relative research, especially for verifying the effectiveness of cultural meaning transmission by integrating culture into tourism products.