In the modern marketing, retail services and hospitality industry has shown great interests in the use of scents; the sense of smell may be emerging as surprisingly tools in service settings. Several researchers have stated that ambient scent can affect consumers’ affective and cognitive reaction, then affecting their memory, evaluation, attention and these can in turn lead to approach behavior of consumers. Though some studies have focused on the impact of ambient scent on emotion, cognition, and consumer behavior in the retail industry; but there is comparatively little attention has been dedicated to the impact of ambient scent in the hotel industry. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to explore the effect of ambient scent on guests’ emotion, satisfaction and behavioral intentions of their hotel service experience. Experimental design has applied to this study to examine the effect of the ambient scent in Taipei five star hotels. The findings confirmed the relationship between scent, emotion, satisfaction and behavioral intentions and indicated that ambient scent had significant effects on guests’ emotions, while latter influenced on guest’ satisfaction and behavioral intentions. Based on the findings derived from experimental design and factor analysis in this study, the results provide a better interpretation and insights on the relationship between consumer behavior and emotion in hotel environmental settings as well as in marketing development.
