Applying Kansei Engineering to service design: A case study of budget hotel service

Due to the rising competition in budget hotel sector, it becomes more and more imperative for service providers to increase their competitiveness. Nowadays, customers have put more attention to satisfy their feelings. Therefore, service designers need to investigate customers' real feelings and improve their services to meet customers' needs. In this paper, the Kansei Engineering (KE), a tool for translating people's feelings and emotions into product or service elements, is adopted for the budget hotels services. Moreover, in the experiment part, the associations between Kansei and customers' overall satisfactions are also taken into account. By this, we focus on the relationships between the service attributes and Kansei, and the ones between Kansei and customers' overall satisfactions. Among these, the Partial Least Squares (PLS) regression method is utilized to analyze these relationships. Finally, we have achieved a meaningful result and demonstrated that KE performs well on solving the budget hotel service problem.