The Relationship amongst Customer Satisfaction, Loyalty, Demographic and Tripographic1 Attributes: A Case of Star Rated Hotel Guests in Ethiopia

Abstract

The hospitality industry in general and hotels in particular attend to diverse guests and their expectations. The satisfaction of all hotels guests and retaining them as a loyal customer, given their different profiles, is imperative but challenging to the sector. This study aims to address this very issue by trying to establish the relationship amongst, customer satisfaction, loyalty, demographic and tripographic attributes by focusing on the hotel guests who stayed in star rated hotels in Ethiopia. Satisfaction was measured as satisfaction with the product, satisfaction with the employees and overall satisfaction. Likewise, customer loyalty was measured with the likelihood of customers to return to the same hotel in the future. “A total of 1200 questionnaires distributed to 40 hotels out of which 415 hotel guests responded, by completing the questionnaires”. “The result of inferential statistical techniques reveals that there were significant positive relationships between the customer satisfaction variables” (products .488; p<0.001; staff .460; p<0.001), and the customer’s willingness to stay in the same hotel again.” Though all variables of “customer satisfaction affected customer loyalty, the overall satisfaction variable had the highest standardized coefficient (0.328) with a statistical significance (p < 0.01), followed by satisfaction with the product (.227, p<.01), and satisfaction with employees (.190, p<.01). There was also no statistically significant difference (p>.05) in the mean scores of the customer satisfaction and loyalty across the gender, age, marital status and employment type groups of respondents. With regards to the tripographic variables, there was a statistically significant difference (P<.05) in the mean scores of both the customer satisfaction and loyalty across the staying preference of rated hotel types of customers. Additionally, there was a statistically significant difference (p>.05) in the mean scores of customer loyalty across a source of information on the hotel group of respondents. Hotel managers in Ethiopia need to look at the importance of segmentation of guest based on their demographics and tripographic factors so that they provide personalized service to enhance their customers’ satisfaction that could lead to their loyalty.

Service Customer Loyalty: An Evaluation Based on Loyalty Factors

“…To reach this aim, the authors prepared a set of customer loyalty factors for the evaluation of customer loyalty and tested its applicability to service industries. The suggested set of customer loyalty factors supports the findings of other researchers [16,18,22,23] who suggested the classification of factors based on the main participants in loyalty formation, i.e., the customer, the service provider and the environment.…”

“…Values for factors were determined based on the factor valuation scale, loyalty impact range, and the loyalty effect direction set out in Table 4. Assigning quantifying values to factors makes it possible to calculate the loyalty value, to find out average values of different loyalty groups [16,18,22,23], and to determine the loyalty status: Disloyalty, intermediate, conditional, or absolute loyalty [80,81]. We reassured the management of both companies that the results would be used solely for research purposes.…”

“…Over the last four decades, research on customer loyalty factors has been a prolific field. Marketing scholars [9,11,[13][14][15][16][18][19][20] have developed and validated more than one hundred different factors determining customer loyalty. Classifications of factors determining customer loyalty show that researchers' opinions on collections of factors vary.…”

“…However, in scientific sources, there is no agreement on these categories. In most classifications, factors were not grouped at all; nonetheless, there were attempts to allocate factors to: Customer [16], psychological state [19], emotional state [21], service provider [22,23], communications [24], situation [25], marketing mix [26,27], and environment [18].…”

“…Customer loyalty evaluation is an important condition for the development of customer loyalty. A range of customer loyalty evaluation instruments has been developed by marketing scholars over the last few decades [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. Instruments for the evaluation of customer loyalty can be classified as behavioral, attitudinal, and multidimensional [4][5][6][7][8].…”