Social and Cultural Experiences with Loyalty towards Hotel Services: The Mediating Role of Customer Satisfaction

Abstract

The increasing role of the customer experience, based on the feelings the customers acquire from the interaction with a firm’s product and services, has been considered an effective influence on customer satisfaction and loyalty. Customer satisfaction also plays a linking role in the performance–loyalty link. This study, therefore, investigated the effect of the social- and cultural-experience dimensions on loyalty towards hotel services, with customer satisfaction playing a mediating role. Based on a cross-sectional survey of 532 customers of three-star hotels in Lagos State, Nigeria, the analysis was carried out with partial least squares structural equation modelling. The results showed that social and cultural experience jointly account for about 38% of the variance in consumer loyalty, customer satisfaction has a moderate impact size on loyalty, and social and cultural experiences have a moderate and low effect size on customer loyalty, respectively. The study further established an indirect and significant effect to show that customer satisfaction partially mediates the association between cultural experience and loyalty and the association between social experience and loyalty. Consequently, since the hotel service environment provides the types of experiences that customers expect, sustainability strategies based on the aspects of the hotel service environment would provide memorable experiences for guests’ satisfaction and loyalty. Furthermore, this study has both theoretical and practical implications for researchers and practitioners, by suggesting additional dimensions to the traditional customer-experience realms.