The study evaluates the influence of national culture on the relationships between tourist motivation, service interactions with hotel employees, and place attachment. These relationships are ascertained among four groups of visitors to the island of Mauritius. The overall structural model, tested on a sample of 545 visitors, indicates that motivation and service interactions are strong determinants of place attachment. Multi-group analysis shows there is no relationship between service interactions and place dependence for all four groups of visitors (German, South African, French and British). However, there are differences in the relationships between motivation, place identity and place dependence for all four groups. The findings have important implications for hotel managers, destination marketing and management, and employee training.

The influential role other customers play in forming a customer's service experience has gained growing academic and managerial attention recently. We intend to extend this stream of the research by proposing the effect of the interactions with other customers on the customer's quality perception of the service provided by the service firm. Through our findings we suggest that service firms should look beyond service personnel and consider other customers as a human factor influential on customer perceptions of service quality. Specifically, we propose that the perceived quality of C2C interactions indirectly affect customer perceptions of service quality through the mediation by the perceived social-emotional support. Using the selective halo effect theory, we theorize that the perceived quality of C2C interactions influence perceived quality of the assurance and empathy dimensions of SERVQUAL. We also suggest that the strength of the effect depends on customer role types. In order to fill the gap in the customer interaction research, which is mostly centered around experiential service settings, we choose a service setting in which functional benefits are more valued (i.e. healthcare services). Our study findings will help service managers become more aware of the importance of managing C2C interactions and learn specifically which aspects of C2C interactions to manage.