In today's competitive business scenario, every hotel emphasizes in securing loyal guests by delighting them. This study aims to establish the existence of guest delight and thereby provides a solution for maintenance of its constancy in hotels. The study involved interviews with 152 repeat guests of 29 hotels in the 4-star, 3-star and unclassified categories in Guwahati city and a few towns in northeastern India. It also involved structured observation and interviews with the employees of these hotels. The study revealed that various parameters like food and beverage quality, welcoming atmosphere, etc. are related to pleasant surprises of these guests in the hotels where they stayed. Their pleasant surprises are linked to their level of excitement which is in turn related to their positive feelings. It is connected to surpassing their expectations of happiness in them resulting in guest delight. In due course of time, these delighter features are assimilated with the satisfier features of the hotel service. With every successive purchase, guests tend to expect the earlier delighter features which ultimately affect the profitability of the hotels at some point of time. Any hotel may create transitory delight or reenacted delight to provide a solution to this unique problem.

Delight refers to "great pleasure" or "joyful satisfaction" that a person experiences from a product, service, experience, idea and so on. In fact, delight can also be attributed to one that "affords extreme enjoyment" (Reader's Digest Universal Dictionary, 1988; and Webster Comprehensive Dictionary, 2001).

Keiningham and Vavra (2001) states, "customer delight will only be achieved by exceeding all the base expectations in the performance of a product or in the delivery of service (or in the servicing that accompanies a product or service)". Delight is the "emotional response to a successful business transaction". Zeithaml et al. (2008) state that customer delight refers to the "profoundly positive emotional state" resulting from one's expectations "exceeded to a surprising degree". Lynch (1993) describes customer delight as the "capacity to provide customers with experiences that transcend normal standards of quality services".

Delighting customers (guests) has become an important strategy for most companies and organizations, including hotels, in their quest for higher profitability and survivality (Stewart,1997; Skogland and Siguaw, 2004; and Torres and Kline, 2006). It basically involves providing an added set of unexpected benefits along with the core product and/or service which surprises the customer leaving him/her enthralled with a favorable attitude regarding the hotel. In today's globalized business scenario, every hotel has experienced tougher competition and thereby most of their decisions are made keeping in view the prevailing and changing tastes of existing and prospective guests in relation to their services. In fact, all the various activities of such hotels, viz., planning, organizing, leading, coordinating, controlling and staffing are aimed at satisfying their guests. However, keeping in view the number of their competitors, merely satisfying customers is not enough (Stewart, 1997). Thus, customer loyalty has gained importance along with guest satisfaction for hotels. However, guest loyalty cannot be obtained only by satisfying. It requires to venture beyond customer satisfaction. The most promising path towards obtaining customer loyalty is by achieving customer delight (Torres and Kline, 2006). Therefore, there is a vital need for hotels to move beyond simply satisfying guests towards delighting them in order to retain them (Burns et al., 2000).

Marketing Management Journal, Guest Delight, Hotel Industry, Customer Delight, Customer Loyalty, Customer Satisfaction, Reliable Reservation System, Convenient Payment Method, Hotel Management, Disconfirmation Theory, Data Collection.