Make Yourself at Home: Cross-Cultural Differences in Home Hospitality

Abstract

The practice of hospitality at home is rooted in the traditions that are unique to the prevailing culture of the destination. This exploratory study describes the development of a set of attributes designed to assess home hospitality and uses it as an instrument to explore cross-national differences on a combined sample of 625 respondents from three culturally distinctive countries such as Egypt, South Korea, and the US. Results show significant differences across the three countries in the areas of 1) sociability, 2) accommodation and facilitation, and 3) openness, which are the three derived dimensions of home hospitality. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.