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Smell is considered to be the sense that is most closely attached to emotional reactions. This makes scent in the hotel environment an important atmospheric variable to study, because fragrances are expected to increase the likelihood of producing an emotional reaction from consumers. Capitalizing on smell's ability to cue memories and conjure up emotions, the purpose of this research is to examine the emotional states evoked by various hotel scents in a hotel business in Hong Kong that uses scent throughout its premises. More specifically, this study intends to make a connection between the emotional states evoked by the hotel scents and how hotel businesses can make use of their guests' emotional responses. Scent marketing is an overlooked subject in hospitality and tourism research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous literature has focused on luxury tourism or luxury shopping, revealing that luxury-driven attitudes comprised unveiled reasons such as materialism, a desire for social status and the need to conform with others. Different outlets play different roles in the enactment of shopping attitudes, but even this has been scarcely researched within the context of tourism. This research combines these three areas of research in order to assess how materialism, the desire for status or to conform with others enact tourists’ intentions of buying luxuries while on holiday, within different outlets. A sample of 314 tourists in Hong Kong was used to test eight hypotheses, by means of an ordered probit model. The study’s findings enlighten the social nature of luxury tourists’ shopping behaviours, a nature that depends not only on what they buy but also largely on where they buy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]