Hospitality Art Experience Model: The Effects of Visual Art on Guests’ Attitudes and Behavior

Abstract

Art evokes a wide range of effects, including emotional, cognitive, and behavioral outcomes. Despite the growing recognition of the role of art in tourism and hospitality, there is a gap in understanding how the different attributes of visual art influence guests’ responses. This perspective paper aims to address this gap by introducing a conceptual framework of the effects of visual art attributes on guests’ perceptions and behavioral intentions and calls for future research on the effects of different art characteristics in hospitality settings. Various attributes of visual art, such as the style, content, size, context, color palette, and thematic relevance of artworks, can serve as antecedents to guest experiences. Several factors can moderate the relationships between different art attributes and perceptions of art, including socio-demographic characteristics, personality traits, cultural differences, familiarity with art, and prior experiences. Hotel or vacation rental characteristics, including price, service quality, ratings, amenities, and other factors, can also interact with art perceptions in shaping attitudes toward the accommodation and behavioral intentions. A combination of survey methods, interviews, experience sampling, experiments, and emerging techniques can be applied in future studies to explore the effects of visual art and its attributes on guest and business outcomes. The proposed framework brings important implications for both academic scholarship and industry practice.