Social media, customers' experience, and hotel loyalty programs

In the last decade, hospitality companies have broadly adopted new technologies and social media tools for marketing purposes. One important application is the engagement with customers through a relationship approach. In this article, we focus on understanding how hotels employ these tools to boost...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Sánchez Casado, Noelia, Artal Tur, Andrés, Tomaseti Solano, Eva
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión borrador
Fecha de publicación:2019
País:España
Institución:Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena(UPCT)
Repositorio:Repositorio Digital UPCT
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.upct.es:10317/13274
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10317/13274
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cog/ta/2019/00000024/00000001/art00004
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Social media
Hospitality industry
Loyalty programs
Customer expertise
Overall satisfaction
Comercialización e Investigación de Mercados
5801.01 Medios Audiovisuales
Descripción
Sumario:In the last decade, hospitality companies have broadly adopted new technologies and social media tools for marketing purposes. One important application is the engagement with customers through a relationship approach. In this article, we focus on understanding how hotels employ these tools to boost their loyalty programs. First, we analyzed how the main Spanish hotel chains make use of social media in their marketing activities. In this stage, we employed information from the website and social media sites of hotel chains and their corresponding brands. Secondly, we tested for the influence of customers' experience on declared satisfaction with loyalty programs. By relying on questionnaire data, we tested for three main working hypotheses analyzing the interactions among benefits of hotel loyalty programs, customers' expertise with the hotel industry, and degree of satisfaction with those programs. The main results show that the degree of expertise of hotel customers clearly determines their level of satisfaction with loyalty programs. Managerial implications from the research remark on the effectiveness of social networks and the necessity of customizing the message according to the profile of the client to get higher impact of the campaigns.