Understanding the dimensions of customer relationships in the hotel and restaurant industries

Abstract

The purposes of this research were, first, to examine the dimensionality of hospitality customer relationships and, second, to develop a multi-dimensional customer relationship scale validated with both antecedent measures of marketing effectiveness and effect measures of financial performance. While hospitality marketing research has frequently focused on the relationships between various marketing actions and different dimensions of customer relationships, there is a lack of research examining customer relationships as a multi-dimensional construct. For both the hotel and restaurant industries, scale development procedures with confirmatory factor analyses were used to identify the dimensions of customer relationships: engagement, motivation, commitment, cross-buying, word of mouth, and defection. The nomological validity of these dimensions was tested using the antecedent of service quality and the effect of customer lifetime financial value. The paper concludes by articulating, first, the theoretical and practical applications of the proposed scale and, second, an agenda for future research.