Children as customers in luxury hotels: What are Parisian hotel managers doing to create a memorable experience for children?

This purpose of this study was to explore two key issues in experiential marketing from an organizational perspective: the management of “strategic experiential modules” and the management of “service encounters” specific to a memorable experience for children in urban luxury hotels.

An integrated model combining managerial and practice-oriented frameworks was used to study how luxury hotel managers design and create memorable experiences for children. The study took a qualitative approach in collecting in-depth data and interviewed 35 managers of five-star luxury hotels in Paris. The data were processed using the Alceste software, an automated lexical program that analyzed the co-occurrence of words and sentences.

With regard to the integrated model, the analysis of the interviews distinguished four main dimensions, which accounted for more than 84 per cent of the original textual data. Three dimensions, related to emotional-sensorial-physical experiential modules, described how managers strategically managed the child experience and journey while at their hotel. A fourth dimension was also identified in relation to the upstream of the service encounter. The findings highlighted a significant gap in how hotel managers were managing the experiences of children under 12 years of age and that further incorporation of various touchpoints is needed to improve the management of the service design.

This study demonstrated the applicability of the proposed integrated model, which offers valuable marketing implications for luxury hotel managers. It is suggested that more research on the management of the child experience and journey is conducted in the future.

To the best of the researchers’ knowledge, this is the first empirical study to combine these two frameworks to study the management of the child experience and journey in the luxury hospitality sector.