This study aims to explore hotel service quality and its emotional and behavioral impacts within the context of the hotel industry in Nepal. Specifically, it examines the relationships between service quality, perceived value, positive emotions, memorable experiences, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty by employing the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) framework. A quantitative approach was utilized for the study. Data were collected from hotel customers in Nepal. The hypothesized relationships were tested with structural equation modeling using SPSS and AMOS. The study found that service quality significantly influences the internal psychological and emotional states of customers. Specifically, service quality positively affects perceived value, positive emotions, and memorable experiences, suggesting that high-quality hotel services enhance customer’s cognitive evaluation and emotional reactions during their stay. Consistent with the organism component of the SOR theory, perceived value and positive emotions play important mediating roles in translating service quality into memorable experiences. Similarly, memorable experiences serve as a key organism state that links internal reactions to behavioral outcomes. Memorable experiences mediate the relationships between service quality and both customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, which represent response stage in the SOR framework. Overall, the findings strongly support the applicability of the SOR theory in explaining customer behavior in the hotel industry. Service quality acts as environmental stimulus that shapes customer’s cognitive and emotional states, which in turn drive favorable behavioral responses such as satisfaction and loyalty. By highlighting the sequential process through which service quality influences internal psychological mechanisms and subsequent behavioral outcomes, this study provides a deeper theoretical understanding of customer experience formation in hospitality settings. Moreover, findings of this study offer valuable insights for enhancing service strategies and improving customer experiences.
Pande et al. (Tue,) studied this question.