The importance of customer satisfaction and delight on loyalty in the tourism and hospitality industry

Abstract

Goal and objectives of the dissertationGoalThis study is to contribute to the development of the body of knowledge of customer satisfaction, delight, and loyalty studies in the context of the tourism and hospitality industry. Additionally, this study is expected to provide a deeper understanding of customer satisfaction, delight, and loyalty for managers to more effectively serve customers by better understanding loyalty creation and retention.Objectives-To examine relationships among customer satisfaction, delight, and loyalty in the context of the tourism and hospitality industry.-To understand the existence of cognitive, affective, conative, and action loyalties.-To test the differences in the relationships among customer satisfaction, delight, and loyalty between first-time and repeat guests-To test the differences in the relationships among customer satisfaction, delight, and loyalty between loyalty program members and non-members.MethodologyTo test relationships among factors, a survey was conducted on the overnight hotel guests who stayed at a Midwestern resort during the summer of 2009 in the months of July, August, and September. The total sample size was 3709 (online surveys: 3459 and paper surveys: 250) and the subjects of this study were 1660 guests who completed either an online (1573 subjects, 46% of response rate) or paper survey (87 subjects, 35% of response rate). The survey instrument consists of six sections including the respondents' demographic data and travelling characteristics. To answer the research questions, structural equation modelling (SEM) was conducted to explore the relationships among customer satisfaction, delight, and loyalty. The Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS) was also used for all descriptive analyses including the frequency distributions.ResultsThe findings support seven of the eight hypotheses. Customer satisfaction had significant direct influences on cognitive and affective loyalty. The influence of customer satisfaction on cognitive loyalty (β=0.69, pFrom the additional analysis between the groups of first-time guests and repeat guest, customer delight has a greater effect on cognitive loyalty and affective loyalty in the group of first-time guests (β=0.35, β=0.53) compared to the group of repeat guests (β=0.24, β=0.41). Customer satisfaction has a greater effect on cognitive loyalty and affective loyalty in the group of repeat guests (β=0.68, β=0.45) compared to the group of first-time guests (β=0.63, β=0.36). For cognitive loyalty, there is no direct effect on conative loyalty in the group of first-time guests while cognitive loyalty has a positive effect on conative loyalty in the group of repeat guests (β=0. …