Understanding the Determinants of Customer Satisfaction and Revisit Intentions in Theme Restaurants- Case of Steam

Abstract

The emergence of theme restaurants has made the dining experience more experiential. Besides serving food, theme restaurants aim to provide immersive experiences to their customers by creating a vivid restaurant setup. Customers in theme restaurants feel that they are in another world. Though theme restaurants' core functional activity is serving food like regular restaurants, they are very distinct from regular restaurants in their service offerings. The present study has been undertaken to understand the determinants of customer satisfaction in theme restaurants. Further, this study linked customer satisfaction with customers' revisit intentions towards theme restaurants. Studies have been conducted to understand customer satisfaction and revisit intentions toward restaurants by employing primary data gathered through a survey. Previous researchers highlighted the limitations of surveys due to their small sample size. To overcome such limitations present study is conducted by scrapping and analysing user-generated reviews from TripAdvisor. 1126 reviews of ‘Steam,’ a theme restaurant located in Jaipur, were analyzed using bigram analysis, and the determinants of customer satisfaction and revisit intentions were extracted. Results revealed 13 determinants of customer satisfaction like ‘Food,’ ‘Mention of Staff & Chef,’ ‘Service,’ ‘Dining experience,’ ‘Theme,’ etc. Further, the study was able to link customer satisfaction with customer revisit intentions, where the determinants of customer revisit intentions were largely identical to customer satisfaction.