Do You Love Open Kitchen Restaurants? Exploring Visitors’ Motivators of Restaurant Visit for Sustainable Growth of Tourism’ Industry: An Abstract

This study examines how restaurants’ concern shifted towards visitors’ motivating factors and their impact on visitors’ attachment with the restaurants which leads restaurants to have loyalty from visitors. Authors investigate whether attitude towards restaurants and digital relationship experience is mediating the established relationship or not. We also explored the role of open kitchen service in a restaurant as a moderator. An empirical investigation was carried out on a total of 745 respondents from India, where primary data was collected through an online survey method. Items drawn for the current study are based on an exhaustive literature review. This study has utilised symmetric as well as asymmetric methods to test and validate the data analysis results. For symmetric model assessment, this study has used SmartPLS, Process Micro, and Artificial Neural Network and for asymmetric modelling, fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) has been applied. The empirical study outcomes confirm that visitors’ attachment with restaurants is high when restaurants are taking care of motivating factors such as: engaging their visitors in online communities, aspire to inspire, customized billboards, VIP gestures, quality of hygienic food, user-generated content in the form of reviews. Also, building a relationship with visitors helps to build their experience in favour of restaurants which turns them into loyal visitors. And, most important, the concept called the open kitchen is quite appreciated by the young generation. The concept explored in the current study is innovative since it gives the new direction to the restaurants to build their loyalty and get connected with the visitors with more advanced motivating factors that help them to build visitors’ attachment towards the restaurants.