Hotel guests who can customize their rooms by selecting the layout, snack bar offerings, and softness of the pillows are more likely to become loyal customers of that hotel and recommend it to others.

A new study published in Cornell Hospitality Quarterly finds that guests who gain some sense of ownership for their hotel room show a greater attachment to the brand after they check out. Encouraging “psychological ownership” of hotel rooms offers a new, cost-effective strategy to enhance customer loyalty, said study coauthor Suzanne Shu, dean of faculty and research at Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business and John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.

“These very small interventions, including allowing people to choose their room at the time of check-in or encouraging them to move the furniture around, can have a big impact on the sense of ownership that people feel and the loyalty they have towards the hotel,” Shu said. 

The paper, “Increasing Hotel Loyalty through Psychological Ownership,” relied on four separate studies that showed the tangible benefits of increasing guests’ psychological ownership of their rooms. The study defined psychological ownership as a perceptual state that is “best described as the territorial feeling that something is ‘mine.’”

Read the full story on the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business website.

Sherrie Negrea is a freelancer for the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.