Impact of Interior and Exterior Designs on Demand for Hotels

Abstract

This study mainly focused on investigating the impact of interior and exterior designs on demand for hotels in Sri Lanka. According to previous literature there is a close correlation between the designing of a hotel and the tourist’s arrivals. Although the developed countries are highly considering about this psychological concept, Sri Lankan hotels do not cover the full range of designing as designing is a wide range of concept. Therefore it is significant to improve the tourism industry with the interior and exterior designing as it may support to the guests mental satisfaction, customer loyalty and perception. The main objective of this study was to investigate the impact of interior and exterior designs on demand for hotels, to identify the relationship between interior and exterior designs, customer perception, and to examine the importance in designing to increase the demand for hotels. The study site was taken as the Hikkaduwa. The sample size was taken as 30 hotels and the 60 tourists and sample selection was done based on stratified random sampling method. The data was collected through interviews, questionnaires and field observations. The analysis was conducted by the factor analysis with creating interior and exterior indexes, simple linear regression and one-way ANOVA. The results were found out that the interior and exterior designs were impact on the arrivals and also there is a positive relationship between the designing and customer perception. Furthermore, this study concluded that the hotel lobby designing, wall colours, room decors, star type and the room type were extremely important to increase the demand for hotels. Finally, it was recommended to develop the green hotel designing in Sri Lanka. The policy implications can be established as the better management in the hospitality business and by promoting eco-tourism in Sri Lanka.