Restorative quality in tourist hotel marketing pictures: natural and built characteristics

Individuals often expect to recover from the fatigue of their regular lives when they engage in tourism activities. However, the intangible features of the service lead to the tourist hotels must identify associated physical clues to include in marketing pictures. Those pictures should attract the attention of these pressured customers and influence their accommodation decisions. Based on attention restoration theory, this study used eye-tracking analysis and questionnaires to investigate the influence of images of natural and built hotel scenes on visual attention and assessments of the hotel's restorative quality. This study used 24 marketing images from a hotel as the experimental stimulus, and 80 participants with an average age of 55 years participated in the experiments. Empirical results suggest that visual clues in hotel marketing pictures can influence customers' visual behaviour and assessments of restorative quality. In particular, images of natural scenes may attract more visual attention than those of built scenes, and natural scenes may also signal higher restorative quality to potential customers.