Cruise Customer Loyalty Improvement with Social Media

Abstract

Social media become more and more important due to growing Internet usage, enhancements of information systems, and more and more spreading of smartphones. Social media offer various opportunities and chances for cruise operators like advertising, distribution, public relations, human resources management and customer loyalty. To enable and enhance customer loyalty, it is important to be competitive: cruise operators save money in advertising, target focus groups, are interactive and respond to needs of customers directly. For cruise operators it is important to know which social media are available, what kind of advantages and disadvantages exist, how they can use social media to enable and enhance customer loyalty and which social media correspond best to a cruise operator’s goals. A decision must be made between moderated and unmoderated social media. Our research is based on a literature review, an Internet search and an illustrative case study with two cruise operators. It shows that Royal Caribbean International (RCI) and AIDA Cruises (AIDA) already use many different social media such as You Tube (YT), Facebook (FB), HolidayCheck (HC), Cruise Critic (CC) and also their web pages. Both cruise operators are well present on FB: but, RCI still has to improve its involvement. Furthermore, our research shows that it is necessary for both cruise operators to follow long-term social media strategies and to measure success quantitatively and qualitatively. They have to consider critical success factors of social media like authenticity, personalization, openness, honesty and transparency for their long-term social media strategies. Moderation of social media is essential to supervise and “control” content, to answer questions seriously and to interact with consumers timely.