Sport Tourists' Loyalty: A Conceptual Model

Abstract

This research promotes an innovative qualitative methodology, the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET), for sport and tourism research. ZMET has been applied mainly in marketing research (e.g., advertising) for major companies. This study adopts ZMET because of its sophisticated imaging techniques in eliciting both consumers' spoken and tacit thoughts and feelings (e.g., more valid, more reliable) in a way that traditional methods do not. Furthermore, the powerful data elicitation technology available through ZMET enhances not only the data collection process, but also the interpretation of that data and the study's trustworthiness (i.e., validity, reliability, and credibility). The study findings suggest a conceptual model that combines exchange theories with essential and necessary dispositional variables to explain sport tourists' loyalty development processes. The model contains four antecedents of loyalty with ‘exchange-relationships’ as the moderator and ‘trust’ as a precursor. The concept of social and resource exchanges reflecting the long-term nature of consumer consumption processes enables this model to capture the complex and dynamic relationships in the loyalty development processes. This model also rises to the marketing challenge of building long-term consumer relationships. Sport tourists' loyalty, therefore, might be strengthened or retained by maximizing trust and several or all of these antecedents through customer relationship building with social and resource exchanges.