Service and Experience with J. N. Halm: Satiation: Diminishing returns in customer experience

There is a beach resort in the Central Region of Ghana that I visited in the first week of 2024—and I must admit the place had me absolutely enchanted. The ocean view from the balcony, the unhurried pace of the mornings, and the particular way the light fell across the water at dusk were something else.

I can still describe it all with the kind of vivid, slightly breathless detail that people use when a place has genuinely moved them. I am thinking of taking a much-needed vacation, and the place immediately seems like a good place to return to. I cannot imagine anywhere else I would rather be.

However, there is a thought holding me back from booking the place this time around. I am afraid the second visit will not be pleasant enough. It is not that the resort will change. I have seen recent videos of the place, and it is still as enchanting as ever.

The view will still be lovely. But something in my past experiences tells me that there will be something subtly, unmistakably different the next time I visit the place. I am afraid the magic of the first time will not quite be recaptured.

I might still enjoy myself—but it might be that kind of enjoyment that people enjoy a good meal they have had many times before, rather than the way they enjoy it the very first time. And if I do not enjoy myself as I did the first time, I am not prepared to pay quite the same price as I did pay the first time around. That is the truth—and that is why I am thinking it might be a great idea to return to this place.

Call me odd, but I am not alone in this feeling. In fact, what I am experiencing is what researchers call satiation. And there is even a study that asserts that this experience—this quiet emotional cooling that follows repeated exposure to even genuinely enjoyable things—has measurable and significant consequences for the hospitality industry’s most critical pricing decisions. The study was titled “Influence of Satiation on Consumer Behaviour in Hospitality,” and the results were published in the November 2021 edition of the Psychology & Marketing journal.

Satiation is not dissatisfaction. This distinction is crucial, and it is one that the research handles with admirable care. A satiated customer is not a disappointed customer. They have not had a bad experience. They have, in fact, had a good one—possibly several good ones. But repetition, even of pleasure, has a diminishing quality.

The appetite, once fully fed, does not respond to the same stimulus with the same intensity. The resort that thrilled on the first visit becomes, by the second or third, simply a known quantity. Comfortable, yes. Reliable, certainly. But no longer surprising, and no longer capable of generating the particular emotional lift that a genuinely novel experience produces.

The researchers designed a study that tracked customers’ willingness to pay across two stays at the same type and category of tourist accommodation. What they found was striking. Satiated customers—those who had repeated the same hedonic experience and were beginning to feel the emotional effects of that repetition—were willing to pay up to 11.2% less for their second stay than they had been willing to pay for their first.

That is not a marginal figure. In an industry where profit margins are closely watched and pricing decisions carry enormous strategic weight, an 11.2% reduction in willingness to pay is the kind of number that demands a serious response.

But the research reveals something even more nuanced than a simple decline in willingness to pay. The moderating effect of satiation on the relationship between repeat purchases was found to be U-shaped, not linear. This means that the story of satiation and willingness to pay is not a straightforward downward slide.

At a certain point in the satiation curve, something interesting happens. The relationship turns. Willingness to pay, having declined with the onset of satiation, eventually begins to recover. The guest who stayed away long enough, who allowed the memory of the experience to breathe and mature, may find that the appeal begins to rebuild—and with it, the price they are willing to accept.

As a matter of fact, this U-shaped dynamic is one of the more practically instructive findings in recent hospitality research. It tells us that satiation is not necessarily a permanent condition. It is a phase—one with a trajectory that can, at least in principle, be managed.

The customer who feels emotionally full after a second stay is not a lost customer. They are a customer in a particular emotional state that, given the right amount of time and the right kind of engagement, can shift. The question for hospitality managers is not only how to prevent satiation, but how to respond to it intelligently when it arrives.

I have realised that too many businesses in the hospitality space treat the repeat customer as a solved problem. The guest who has come back is, by this logic, already won—a loyal customer whose continued patronage can be assumed and whose willingness to pay can be held steady or even nudged upward over time. The research upends this assumption entirely.

A repeat guest is not simply a satisfied guest on a second visit. They are a guest whose emotional relationship with the experience is actively changing, and whose pricing behaviour is shifting in ways that may not be immediately visible in a satisfaction survey.

This is precisely why the concept of satiation deserves far more attention in hospitality management than it currently receives. The industry’s dominant frameworks around customer loyalty tend to focus on building deeper attachment over time—more visits, more points, more rewards, more reasons to return.

What the satiation research suggests is that deeper attachment needs to be accompanied by deliberate novelty. The loyal guest must be continuously surprised, continuously given something they did not expect, and continuously offered a reason to experience the property as something slightly new. Without that freshness, loyalty alone is not enough to hold willingness to pay at its original level.

One can only imagine the revenue implications for a hotel that has never thought about this. A property with a strong base of returning guests might look, from the outside, like a model of stability.

But if those returning guests are quietly entering the satiation zone—if their emotional engagement is cooling and their willingness to pay is softening—then the revenue picture is far more fragile than it appears. The rates that worked in Year 1 may face quiet resistance in Year 2. And the guests who drift away to somewhere new may not be disloyal. They may simply be satiated.

The practical responses available to hospitality businesses are more varied than they might first appear. Room upgrades and seasonal redecorations are obvious interventions, but they address only the physical dimension of the experience.

The deeper opportunity lies in the design of the emotional journey across multiple visits—ensuring that each stay introduces something unexpected, something that reframes what the guest thought they already knew about the property.

A new culinary concept. A partnership with a local artist. A curated experience available only to returning guests that makes them feel seen rather than simply accommodated. The goal is to interrupt the satiation curve before it fully sets in.

There is an old saying that familiarity breeds contempt. In hospitality, the research suggests, familiarity breeds something perhaps more commercially dangerous: indifference. The guest who feels they know exactly what to expect from a property has, in a very real sense, already begun to value it less.

The surprise is gone. And in the world of hedonic experiences—experiences purchased not for their utility but for their capacity to generate genuine pleasure—surprise is not a bonus feature. It is a core component of the value being delivered.

This might mean that in my case, I might have to wait a couple more months or even years before I should return to this particular resort, if I really want to enjoy the experience again. Between the last experience and today, I have changed. My emotional baseline has shifted. The wonder that made me so willing—so eager—to pay a premium the first time around has quieted. And no amount of operational consistency is going to bring it back on its own.

In hospitality, the greatest competitor a business faces is not the property down the road. It is the memory of the guest’s own best experience—and the relentless human appetite for something new.

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