An analysis of hospitality consumer lifestyles in the United States

The concept of lifestyle is not only helpful for marketers to target different segments, but also for people to understand themselves in terms of how they behave and what they value. The most highly used lifestyle instruments were developed between 1970 and 1980, and those instruments focused on lifestyles in general, and were mostly constructed commercially rather than published in academia. There is a potential need to construct a lifestyle instrument for use in the hospitality industry in order to investigate the lifestyles of hospitality consumers for more defined market segmentation.

The purposes of this study are to construct a hospitality consumer lifestyle instrument examining how today's consumer engages in hospitality activities in the United States, and for segmenting today's hospitality consumers into different hospitality lifestyle groups. The study instrument addressed face validity and content validity through the use of expert groups and a review of literature. The reliability test coefficient alpha (a) was 0.8258 for the study instrument.

The study results show that mid-priced with food and beverage was the hotel segment people selected for both business and leisure purposes. Cleanliness was the most important criteria for people when they select or change a hotel. Respondents took three to five trips annually where they spent at least one night at a hotel. Over the past year, individuals took approximately five trips within the state and three trips outside the state they currently live in. Most did not travel internationally. The duration of their trips was usually one to three days. The average person went out to eat one to three times a week and spent between S21 and S40. Diner was the most common dining out meal and seafood was the most popular cuisine.

Using this data, the study was able to cluster three lifestyle segments—familyfocused group, active-fun lovers group, and secure inactive group—for current hospitality consumers. The family-focused group has a stable hospitality lifestyle with a familyoriented concentration. Members of the family-focused group are mostly white, married, males, college graduates, and have three children but no child under age 18 lives with them currently. The active-flin lovers group heavily and actively engages in hospitality activities. The members in this group are younger, highly educated, take several trips every year, spend more money while eating away from home, and consume more alcoholic beverages then the other two groups. The secure inactive group does not actively engage in most hospitality activities. This group is dominated by married, white, females and security is the most important value to them. These segments can be helpful to marketers as well as consumer scientists for a better understanding of today's consumers in the United States.