Creating customer loyalty in the hotel industry: the challenge of today's businesses
2005
Karkavatsos, Y.
For many years hospitality firms have believed that the goal of marketing is to create as many new customers as possible. This search for new customers is called conquest marketing. Nowadays, however conquest marketing is considered to be necessary but not sufficient, as most hotel industry segments are mature and competition is strong. Loyalty marketing is the topic of this research. We focus on loyalty - a relationship built on trust and commitment between the buyer and the seller. Our objective is to provide guidelines for luxury hotels that seek to take a strategic approach to relationship marketing based on loyalty. We stress the factors that up to a certain degree are responsible for making hotel guests loyal to a hotel, and provide a gap analysis so as to indicate the sectors that hotel managers have to work on and improve. Finally, we identify the behavioral outcomes of loyalty (increased product use, promotion of the hotel) and prove that trust is the most important factor to the success of a partnership. The population for this study consisted of guests who ha repeatedly visited hotels that belong to the Calypso Hotels Ltd chain. After sending out 120 questionnaires we received 87 and conducted 18 interviews so as to reach the target of 100 usable responses. SPSS and Lisrel 8.5 software were used in the descriptive analysis and testing of our model The results of this study, although they are based on a limited sample, represent the antecedents and consequences of customer loyalty. In the final chapter we categorize these results and present them as 'Laws of Loyalty'.
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