‘Not on my vacation’: service encounters between able-bodied and disabled consumers–the case of high-contact service

The effect of service encounters on customer satisfaction in high-contact services is gaining wider recognition among academics and practitioners alike. In this exploratory study, we aimed at gaining insight into a specific service encounter, namely, between able-bodied and disabled customers. While many studies have addressed the experiences of disabled persons in a plethora of situations, including tourism and leisure settings, the service experience of able-bodied customers sharing a service environment with disabled customers has been overlooked. Using a simple choice experiment, we showed that when given textual information about the expected presence of disabled guests in advance, two-thirds of the able-bodied study participants would be willing to stay in a hotel with a minor to moderate probability of being co-present with disabled guests. However, when a visual aid was provided together with the textual information, this figure decreased significantly. Implications and potential recommendations for policy-makers and hotel managers are presented, as are suggestions for future research. Such research is imperative if better inclusion of disabled tourists is to be achieved, with the resulting realisation of the immense underexploited economic potential of disabled tourism.