This study was undertaken to test empirically whether frequent business travelers, the backbone of many hospitality operations, act as cognitive misers in familiar consumption situations. In other words, do these customers fail to evaluate typical hotel experiences? The objective of this study was two-fold: First, to determine whether frequent business travelers devote their limited cognitive efforts to redundant satisfaction evaluations; and second, to re-evaluate the usefulness of expectations management in a hospitality context. An experimental method was applied to investigate the research questions. The subject pool was composed of business travelers staying at a mid-priced business hotel during their participation in the computer-interactive study. Response latency and correlational and qualitative data were collected to test the hypotheses. The results from this study largely support the argument that typically frequent business travelers might act as cognitive misers and therefore be unwilling to devote mental efforts to redundant evaluations until faced with an external request or an actual repurchase choice. This implies that expectations management might be a less useful strategy for repeat customers than previously thought.
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