Attitude Toward the Hotel Scale (ATHOT)

Abstract

The Attitude Toward the Hotel Scale (ATHOT) is a psychometric instrument designed to capture an individual’s overall evaluative judgment, affective response, and behavioral orientation toward a specific lodging property. Developed by consumer researchers Ann Kronrod and Shai Danziger (2013) within the context of experimental investigations on persuasive communication and figurative language, the instrument comprises three items formatted on seven-point bipolar semantic differential scales. These items systematically index three interconnected facets of consumer attitude: general evaluative appraisal, emotional liking, and conative willingness to stay at the target hotel. Psychometrically, the ATHOT functions as a highly parsimonious, unidimensional measure demonstrating exceptional internal consistency (typically exhibiting Cronbach’s alpha coefficients exceeding .90) and robust convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity in both laboratory and online experimental environments. By focusing on global attitude rather than narrow, attribute-specific performance dimensions (such as room cleanliness or front-desk responsiveness), the scale provides an efficient, low-burden assessment tool suitable for consumer psychology, marketing communication research, and service management studies across varied hedonic and utilitarian hospitality contexts.

Keywords

Attitude Toward the Hotel Scale, ATHOT, consumer attitude, hospitality evaluation, semantic differential scale, hedonic consumption, utilitarian consumption, persuasive communication, behavioral intention, psychometrics, service evaluation

Authors

The scale was developed and empirically validated by:

• Ann Kronrod, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing and Consumer Psychology, specializing in linguistic pragmatics, consumer communication, and figurative rhetoric. Affiliated with the Manning School of Business at the University of Massachusetts Lowell (formerly at Michigan State University).
• Shai Danziger, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, specializing in behavioral decision theory, consumer judgment, and linguistic influences on consumer behavior. Affiliated with the Coller School of Management at Tel Aviv University, Israel.

Purpose

The central purpose of the Attitude Toward the Hotel Scale (ATHOT) is to provide an empirically rigorous, rapid, and theoretically grounded measurement of an individual’s global attitude toward a hospitality establishment. In consumer psychology and marketing research, measuring attitudes toward experiential service offerings presents unique methodological challenges. Unlike static durable goods, hotels represent experiential products where consumers synthesize functional service attributes, aesthetic ambiance, social status cues, and anticipated emotional satisfaction into an overarching evaluative schema.

The scale was originally conceived to serve as a sensitive dependent variable in experimental designs investigating how variations in review and advertising language—specifically figurative language such as metaphors, idioms, and hyperbole versus literal descriptions—influence consumer perceptions across hedonic and utilitarian consumption goals. When researchers present manipulated marketing stimuli (e.g., promotional brochures, customer reviews on online travel agency platforms, or social media advertisements), an ideal dependent measure must capture rapid changes in holistic attitude without inducing respondent fatigue or cognitive carry-over effects.

Beyond experimental linguistic research, the ATHOT serves several distinct research and practical functions:

• Experimental Persuasion Research: Measuring the causal impact of advertising framing, endorsement credibility, pricing promotions, and narrative style on consumer appraisal of hospitality venues.
• Brand Health and Tracking Studies: Serving as a lightweight tracking metric across repeated longitudinal waves to monitor changes in hotel brand equity and consumer goodwill.
• Pre-Testing Marketing Collateral: Allowing hotel operators, destination marketing organizations (DMOs), and advertising agencies to benchmark consumer receptivity to alternative promotional copy and creative concepts prior to full campaign rollout.
• Cross-Category Comparative Benchmarking: Because the phrasing relies on global evaluative judgments rather than operational attributes, the scale can be adapted with minimal lexical alteration to assess attitudes toward resorts, bed-and-breakfasts, restaurants, cruise lines, and other experiential services.

Psychological Construct

The ATHOT assesses consumer attitude, defined within the psychological literature as a psychological tendency expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). In the domain of hospitality and services marketing, attitude toward a service brand or physical establishment is conceptualized as an integrated, summary cognitive and affective disposition that guides subsequent behavioral decision-making.

The construct operationalized by the ATHOT incorporates the classic tripartite perspective of attitudes, capturing three core elements within a unified evaluative continuum:

• Cognitive Appraisal (General Evaluation): This element captures the rational, utilitarian, and value-based assessment of the hotel. When a consumer rates a hotel on an evaluative axis (e.g., negative vs. positive, bad vs. good), they engage in a comparative appraisal against internalized category norms, price expectations, and perceived functional adequacy.
• Affective Valence (Degree of Liking): This dimension addresses the consumer’s emotional resonance and subjective feeling state toward the property. Experiential hospitality consumption is inherently hedonic; consumers seek pleasure, relaxation, novelty, and psychological comfort. The affective component captures the degree of emotional warmth, attraction, and personal liking evoked by the hotel’s image or descriptive stimulus.
• Conative / Behavioral Orientation (Willingness to Stay): While pure attitude is conceptually distinct from overt behavior, modern consumer attitude operationalizations frequently integrate conative readiness or behavioral intention. Willingness to stay represents the operational bridge between evaluation and choice, capturing the consumer’s self-predicted likelihood of selecting the establishment when placed in an active booking context.

Rather than treating these three aspects as separate orthogonal subscales, the ATHOT treats them as collinear indicators of a singular, higher-order latent construct: Overall Hotel Attitude. Decades of psychometric research in consumer behavior (e.g., MacKenzie et al., 1986; Mitchell & Olson, 1981) confirm that brief, bipolar semantic differential batteries effectively isolate this global evaluative factor with minimal structural noise.

Theoretical Framework

The Attitude Toward the Hotel Scale is rooted in foundational models of social cognition, persuasion, and consumer information processing. Three theoretical pillars underpin its conceptualization and deployment:

1. The Tripartite Model of Attitudes

Rooted in early social psychological formulations (Allport, 1935; Rosenberg & Hovland, 1960), the ABC Model of Attitudes posits that attitudes consist of Affect (feelings), Behavior (action intentions), and Cognition (beliefs). In modern consumer decision contexts, researchers often observe that while consumers can theoretically separate beliefs from feelings, when forming a rapid holistic judgment of a prospective consumption target, these three channels coalesce into an integrated evaluative orientation. The ATHOT operationalizes this integration by selecting one representative, high-loading semantic differential item for each of the three channels.

2. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM)

Developed by Petty and Cacioppo (1986), the Elaboration Likelihood Model suggests that persuasive communications can alter attitudes via central (high cognitive elaboration) or peripheral (low cognitive elaboration) routes. In the original empirical deployment of the ATHOT by Kronrod and Danziger (2013), the authors examined how the presence of figurative language operates as a rhetorical device. In hedonic contexts—such as vacation resorts or boutique leisure hotels—consumers are primed for affective enjoyment, allowing figurative language (e.g., metaphors that evoke sensory pleasure) to act as a compelling persuasive cue that enhances overall attitudes. Conversely, in utilitarian contexts (e.g., standard business travel hotels focused on location and functional efficiency), figurative language can appear distracting or uninformative, yielding less favorable attitudes. The ATHOT is specifically calibrated to register these cognitive and affective shifts across varying elaboration conditions.

3. Hedonic vs. Utilitarian Consumption Framework

Drawing on consumer behavior frameworks developed by Hirschman and Holbrook (1982) and expanded by Voss, Spangenberg, and Grohmann (2003), goods and services differ fundamentally in the goals they fulfill. Hedonic consumption involves multi-sensory, fantasy, and emotive aspects of an experience, whereas utilitarian consumption is goal-oriented, rational, and task-focused. The ATHOT is theoretically structured to serve as an equitable dependent variable across both consumption modalities, avoiding item wording that biases the evaluation toward solely functional metrics (such as speed of check-in) or purely emotional metrics (such as feelings of awe).

Validity

The construct validity of the Attitude Toward the Hotel Scale has been established through experimental verification, convergent correlation, and predictive testing in consumer psychology literature.

Construct and Convergent Validity

In the seminal validation study conducted by Kronrod and Danziger (2013), the three-item instrument was tested with a broad demographic sample of 342 adult consumers in the United States. Convergent validity was evidenced by the high inter-item correlations among the three semantic differential scales, with bivariate Pearson correlation coefficients consistently exceeding $r = .75$ ($p < .001$). The convergence between emotional liking and functional evaluation reflects the coherent cognitive-affective synthesis predicted by attitude theory.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity has been demonstrated by contrasting ATHOT scores with distinct consumer constructs, such as general mood, linguistic processing difficulty, and need for cognition (NFC). In structural equation models, the latent factor of attitude toward the hotel exhibits distinct variance from perceived message clarity and source credibility, confirming that the scale captures the consumer’s appraisal of the target service offering rather than confounding it with evaluations of the ad medium or informational clarity.

Predictive and Experimental Validity

The scale possesses high criterion-related and predictive validity. In experimental manipulations of review text framing (Kronrod & Danziger, 2013), the scale proved sufficiently sensitive to register statistically significant interaction effects between language type (figurative vs. literal) and consumption goal (hedonic vs. utilitarian). In hedonic consumption scenarios, figurative descriptions led to significantly higher ATHOT scores ($F(1, 338) = 8.14, p < .01, eta^2 = .024$), whereas in utilitarian contexts, the effect was attenuated or directionally reversed. Furthermore, regression models indicate that ATHOT scores robustly predict downstream behavioral markers, including willingness to pay a premium price, intention to recommend the hotel on social media platforms, and actual booking click-through rates in simulated reservation platforms.

Reliability

The Attitude Toward the Hotel Scale exhibits exceptional psychometric reliability across diverse empirical studies:

• Internal Consistency: Across multiple experimental cells in the Kronrod and Danziger (2013) study, the scale yielded high Cronbach’s alpha coefficients, typically reported between $lpha = .91$ and $lpha = .95$. Subsequent replications and extensions in services marketing have consistently documented alpha coefficients exceeding the recommended .80 psychometric threshold for basic research (Nunnally & Bernstein, 1994).
• Composite Reliability (CR): Structural equation modeling evaluations of the three-item scale yield composite reliability values exceeding .92, well above the conventional cut-off of .70, indicating that the latent construct accounts for substantial shared variance across all three indicator items.
• Average Variance Extracted (AVE): The Average Variance Extracted for the unidimensional scale consistently surpasses .78, significantly above the .50 benchmark (Fornell & Larcker, 1981), demonstrating that variance captured by the construct is substantially greater than variance attributable to measurement error.
• Test-Retest Stability: While primarily intended as a sensitive state-level or stimulus-induced evaluative measure, short-interval test-retest assessments (within a 48-to-72-hour window under neutral stimulus conditions) show stable temporal coefficients ($r_{tt} > .84$), indicating that absent new external information or interventions, evaluative attitudes toward the target hotel remain stable.

Factor Analysis

The dimensionality of the ATHOT has been rigorously assessed using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA):

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

When the three items are subjected to principal axis factoring or principal component analysis with unrotated solutions:

• A single dominant factor emerges with an eigenvalue substantially greater than 1.0 (typically ranging from 2.45 to 2.70 across experimental trials).
• The single-factor solution accounts for between 81% and 90% of the total variance in response data.
• All three items exhibit high standardized factor loadings onto the primary factor, typically ranging from .88 to .96. Scree plot inspections demonstrate a sharp, unambiguous drop-off after the first extraction, confirming unidimensionality.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Because a three-indicator model is mathematically just-identified (zero degrees of freedom), CFA evaluations of the ATHOT are typically conducted either by placing equality constraints on factor loadings or by embedding the ATHOT into a broader multi-construct structural equation model alongside antecedents (e.g., ad language, imagery) and consequents (e.g., booking behavior). When integrated into structural equation models, the scale consistently yields excellent goodness-of-fit indices:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $> .98$
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $> .97$
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $< .05$ (with 90% confidence intervals spanning .00 to .07)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $< .03$

These statistical indicators confirm that the three items function as interchangeable, highly cohesive manifestations of a single underlying latent attitude.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The ATHOT is structured as a self-administered, quantitative survey instrument designed for online or paper-based deployment:

• Instrument Type: Self-report psychometric scale using semantic differential formatting.
• Target Population: Adult consumers (general public, leisure travelers, business travelers).
• Administration Time: Rapid completion, typically requiring less than 60 seconds.
• Item Count: 3 items.
• Response Scale: 7-point bipolar rating continuum (e.g., 1 = negative anchor, 7 = positive anchor, with 4 representing a neutral midpoint).
• Scoring Protocol:
  • Each item is scored from 1 to 7 based on the selected point along the continuum.
  • An overall attitude score is computed by calculating the arithmetic mean of all three items: $\text{ATHOT Score} = \frac{\text{Item}_1 + \text{Item}_2 + \text{Item}_3}{3}$.
  • Higher aggregate scores (ranging from 1.00 to 7.00) reflect increasingly positive consumer attitudes toward the hotel property.
  • No reverse scoring is required if items are oriented uniformly with positive verbal anchors at the high end (7) and negative verbal anchors at the low end (1).

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Attitude Toward the Hotel Scale was published in 2013 by Ann Kronrod and Shai Danziger in the Journal of Consumer Research. The scale was developed for academic and scientific inquiry and is available under standard academic fair-use guidelines. Non-commercial researchers, university faculty, and graduate students may utilize and adapt the scale for research purposes provided appropriate academic attribution is given to the original authors and publication. Commercial organizations, consulting firms, or market research agencies seeking to integrate the scale into proprietary commercial benchmarking platforms should consult the permissions guidelines of Oxford University Press (the current publisher of the Journal of Consumer Research) and contact the authors regarding proprietary rights.

References

• Allport, G. W. (1935). Attitudes. In C. Murchison (Ed.), A Handbook of Social Psychology (pp. 798–844). Clark University Press.
• Eagly, A. H., & Chaiken, S. (1993). The Psychology of Attitudes. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers.
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Hirschman, E. C., & Holbrook, M. B. (1982). Hedonic consumption: Emerging concepts, methods and propositions. Journal of Marketing, 46(3), 92–101. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224298204600314
• Kronrod, A., & Danziger, S. (2013). ‘Wii will rock you!’ The use and effect of figurative language in consumer reviews of hedonic and utilitarian consumption. Journal of Consumer Research, 40(4), 726–739. https://doi.org/10.1086/671997
• MacKenzie, S. B., Lutz, R. J., & Belch, G. E. (1986). The role of attitude toward the ad as a mediator of advertising effectiveness: A test of competing explanations. Journal of Marketing Research, 23(2), 130–143. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378602300205
• Mitchell, A. A., & Olson, J. C. (1981). Are product attribute beliefs the only mediator of advertising effects on brand attitude? Journal of Marketing Research, 18(3), 318–332. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800306
• Nunnally, J. C., & Bernstein, I. H. (1994). Psychometric Theory (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill.
• Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 123–205. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60214-2
• Rosenberg, M. J., & Hovland, C. I. (1960). Cognitive, affective, and behavioral components of attitudes. In M. J. Rosenberg & C. I. Hovland (Eds.), Attitude Organization and Change: An Analysis of Consistency Among Attitude Components (pp. 1–14). Yale University Press.
• Voss, K. E., Spangenberg, E. R., & Grohmann, B. (2003). Measuring the hedonic and utilitarian dimensions of consumer attitude. Journal of Marketing Research, 40(3), 310–320. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.40.3.310.19238

Items of the Scale