Successful management of customer expectations is an extremely important factor in achieving customer satisfaction. A hospitable culture and user-friendly technology are required to meet customers’ expectations. While technology can have a major impact on customer satisfaction, the various cultural backgrounds of guests also have a significant influence. In the paper, the hotel guests’ cultural backgrounds were studied to understand this aspect’s influence on their expectations and satisfaction. Three major cultural factors, namely brand identity (domestic vs. foreign), customers’ native language, and their country of residence, were observed and analyzed to determine guests’ expectations. The research study used a qualitative design to analyze the data, collected from field observations at two hotels: a Singapore hotel and another in Malaysia. Reviews were also collected from hotel booking websites, in order to understand how the hotels satisfy guest expectations.

The management process for achieving customer delight is crucial for long-term success within the tourism and hospitality industry. In order to achieve customer delight, enterprises require a process for measuring it. This chapter gives an overview of the control circuit of service quality. Drawing on a standard for service excellence developed in Germany, it first outlines theoretical concepts of measuring customer delight for achieving service excellence, and introduces them into the English-language literature on tourism and hospitality. Based on an empirical study, it reports on how measurement is conducted in practice in select businesses in the tourism and hospitality industry in Singapore and Malaysia. Empirical findings show that a business must first determine the standard it aims to attain before designing a measurement. Results from a customer survey need to be reviewed from a business’s perspective. For small-scale businesses, a less sophisticated version of delight measurement may be more appropriate. Examples of how the measurement process itself can be delightful for customers are shown, and recommendations for practice are made.

Purpose: Existing tourism studies focusing on Southeast Asia often emphasize the culture, history and heritage of the region or its natural beauty and cuisine, most of which are often viewed as exotic through a Western lens. By contrast, this interdisciplinary study looks at the untapped potential for modern architectural tourism in Singapore as a fascinating and increasingly authentic way of understanding how the next generation of Singaporean residents will live in their land-scarce city-state. This study aims to highlight the importance of modern architecture as a tourism product in a globalized Asian city. Design/methodology/approach: It engages with visiting architects and their local facilitator to examine the touristic potential energy of cutting-edge residential buildings in Singapore from an intra-Asian viewpoint. By also identifying practical design solutions to promote modern architectural tourism that will have a positive impact on city branding, this study opens the door for future research regarding Southeast Asia’s rapidly changing modern architecture and urban landscape, and how these can be made attractive for its important tourism industry. Findings: The findings suggest that just as Singapore’s cultural diversity has long been viewed as a touristic asset, its authentic, escapist, exotic and spectacular contemporary residential architecture, if well managed, presented and designed, can provide a unique place for sustainable community interactions between locals and visitors, which will help Singapore develop a unique city brand attractive to architectural tourists and even repeat visitors, through a new concept for authenticity in a global city. Originality/value: This cross-disciplinary study linking tourism and architecture explores modern architectural tourism in Singapore, specifically in relation to residential buildings where locals and visitors can interact. © 2021, International Tourism Studies Association.

A trade-off may exist between tourism development and ecological footprint in Singapore since this country has been listed as the top-visited country while also the highest ecological deficit region. This study aims to probe the asymmetric effect of tourism development on the ecological footprint in Singapore from 1978 to 2016. By applying the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag approach, the outcomes obtained revealed that only positive changes in tourism development significantly and negatively influence the ecological footprint in the long term, while the short-run impact is symmetric. In addition, the empirical results showed that an increase in economic growth leads to a development in the ecological footprint, and the influence of energy consumption is not evident. The findings of this study may provide some implications for Singaporean policy-makers to promote tourism development and sustainable economic growth. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.