The hotel sector, one of the main pillars of the tourism industry, recognizes its social responsibility and considers it as part of its image. For this reason, firms require new variables and tools to respond to stakeholders’ needs. Trust is an essential variable in meeting these needs. However, managers are unaware that they can achieve much more through trust than through other variables. In this paper, with a sample of 629 guests in four international hotels, we use a model to show that the corporate social responsibility (CSR) association affects not only customers’ loyalty and the image they have of the hotel, but also their trust. Furthermore, this study confirms that the presence of trust as a mediator between CSR and image and loyalty leads to increased loyalty and positive image among guests. Our study shows that hotels should invest in socially responsible initiatives and develop actions to strengthen trust in order to improve their image and increase loyalty. We anticipate that our study will be a starting point for strengthening the literature on this issue, and call on researchers to extend enquiry in this field and provide hotels with guidelines for improvement in the above-mentioned variables using trust as a mediator.

The accuracy of consumer price knowledge is dependent on numerous factors. This study examined the effect of some variables related to consumers' attitudes towards prices and some demographic variables on price knowledge. Results showed that consumers were more knowledgeable about the relationships between the prices of competitor brands than about the actual prices in themselves. When certain error margins were allowed, the differences between absolute and relative price knowledge were not as evident. In addition, the accuracy of consumer knowledge of prices was found to be dependent on how much importance they placed on price, and it influenced subjects' perceptions of themselves as shoppers. In this study, women and people with low income level were more knowledgeable about prices. The statistical effects and relationships between these variables were analyzed taking into account the economic, social, and cultural setting in which the research was conducted.

The main research objectives of this paper are: first, to identify the three levels of a service evaluation: attributes (service value), outcome (service experience), and values (developing service relationships); secondly, to differ and to relate the perceptions of service value with service experience components. According to the ‘theory of cognitive schemata’ and the ‘means-end theory’, the components of a service experience are hierarchical in nature. Thus, customers evaluate their experiences – and build their service relationships – taking into account not only the attributes of the service (first level of abstraction), but also the outcomes and consequences that those attributes cause on them (highest level of abstraction). Marketing research has been mostly focused on the detection of affective aspects of quality and satisfaction. However, little attention has been devoted to the cognitive organization of the structure of evaluative judgments in the customer’s mind. According to our results, servicescape provides the strongest driver of service value when creating service experiences, followed by service equity. Elements such as the service atmosphere, hotel facilities, etc. are significant contributors to customer’s easiness to relax and escape from routine, which are the two major factors in the service experience. Similarly, hotel managers should take note of the importance of service equity by developing strong brand images which capitalize on customer’s experiences rather than service attributes.